


Where Angels Lie

by modernlove



Category: Bob Dylan (Musician), Rock Music RPF, The Band (Band 1968)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Blood and Injury, Drugs, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Guns, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rock and Roll, Sex, Suicidal Tendencies, Suicidal Thoughts, or rather some comfort, references to rentboy life, wives conspicuously absent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:14:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24935101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modernlove/pseuds/modernlove
Summary: “Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically—to those who hardly think of us in return.” - TH White, The Once and Future King
Relationships: Bob Dylan/Robbie Robertson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy here we are again. Referencing Testimony, This Wheel's on Fire, Chronicles I, Clapton's biography, a wealth of other resources that I smashed together to fit my needs. Title relates to the most debated song in Dylan archives because the lyrics aren't clear, and that's To Fall in Love With You--so you're getting what I hear in one spot. Fiction story is fiction.

**November 2019**

Robbie was the first to admit he didn’t look back until it was too late. Feeling at times like the whole world was on his shoulders, a few things were bound to slip and crack. It read as ruthless or vindictive or worse heartless, and by the time he’d think to wake up and fight it, hardly anyone wanted to hear that tale.

Coming into Nashville it was hard not to think of him. Softly, softly the thoughts battered his mind. Dulled by time. Passion and fury muted, and he was left with the remains of a philosophical idea rather than the person. A person he used to know every dimension of.

Had they wandered down some dead-end office-laden streets he could have come across an eventual home to art, alcohol, and song whose future site of sign would have mentioned the very man. 

He put it off with the rush of interviews, radio spots, and band and managerial check-ins. But on that night before the gig he asked for a sideswipe of a visit before dinner and got out of the car to examine the abandoned church in the first stages of renovation.

Nashville’s Honky Tonk Row not too far away, lights and sounds in a fading roar. Boorish bachelorette parties roaming pavement, the same country song playing from four or more bars, neon burning bright in the night sky.

Here, the church stood silent, the streets bare.

“Hi,” he felt inclined to murmur up at the windows, like he could see inside, like it could see something inside him he no longer could find.

The absence of sound began to sting. His ears ached.

In the adjacent parking lot of soon to be rubble, a headless statue of an angel with blackened breasts beckoned to him. Robbie couldn’t take his eyes off it.

No wonder Bob liked this place, it spoke his language.

Robbie ran his hand over his mouth, words lingering he couldn’t bear to speak.

“What have we done? Where did we go? What of that life with each other?”


	2. Two

**August 1965**

Later he’d liken the at-home portion of the interview to the aversion scene in A Clockwork Orange. Robbie’s eyes clamped open to bear witness to the cacophonous clamor and act coolly interested by it all.

And in a flash it was all over. He’d passed the test, he’d made his pitch and Bob was into the all or nothing play. At that moment Bob seemed interested in everything.

They didn’t head back right away, Bob brought him to the back part of Albert’s house where Bob said he lived. Robbie’s eyes didn’t make it past the record collection.

Hands like attic spiders tiptoeing across album covers, Robbie didn’t look up for what felt like hours. “Say you’ve got good stuff in here.”

“Why are you so surprised?” Bob leaned on the arm of a couch instead of sitting.

“Well I thought—I only thought the bulk of your music collection would be…”

“What?” The way he squinted his eyes, they held a faint glimmer that shone past his glasses. “Broken?”

Wasn’t it obvious? Maybe he was too close to see it. “Folk stuff.”

“Folk stuff,” like the idea had just occurred to him, he smacked his forehead. “Folk stuff, he says.” He addressed the wall before he brought it back to Robbie. “I’m gonna go onstage and bleed rock and roll. Convince every audience I know what I’m talking about, that I’m not just folk stuff. Now I gotta worry about the band too.”

“Oh I’m convinced.” Shrink away from any conflict, become the needle for the record, get the groove on. “You’ve convinced me.”

“Mm,” Bob studied him, cigarette sliding between two fingers. “You’re on the fence, but I’ll win you over.”

Ink Spots, Johnnie and Joe, Jump Jackson. An easy wager could be made. “You know I can tell a lot about a person from their record collection?”

“You wanna read my palm while you’re at it?” he settled back against the couch.

“I’m serious. Here let me try.” Robbie held a 78 of Rocket 88 in his hands. Kings of Rhythm as the Delta Cats. The record worn, the sleeve torn. His fingers sliding over exposed grooves. This story he knew down in his bones. “You learned to play off of records, hearing something just a few times, less than most people need. You’re interested in the rare, the unique. You have a loose definition of the word borrow. You’re ardent about everything and the idea of liking or not liking something disappeared a while back. But the stuff you really care about, that passion lights your skin on fire just thinking about it.” He slid the record back into the sleeve. “You know how things will go before they get there. Sometimes you do things anyway even though you know it’ll turn out wrong. And at some point you realized you were in too deep and this, the music, was going to be the only thing that ever truly understood you.”

Bob listened long after Robbie had stopped talking. “Any chance you used to work at a carnival?”

“Yeah, actually.” he placed the record back.

Eyebrows raised behind his glasses,“Oh shit.”

He had to dismiss it, quick as he could. Walk it back so that anything brewing under Bob’s skin could be dispelled. He sat down in a chair across from him. “I was screwing around, you know. I was just describing myself.”

Bob studied him like a painting in a museum. Then when time stretched long past a comfortable silence, he confirmed, “You’re gonna be trouble.”

“I promise I’m actually very well-behaved.” Robbie offered, fearful of labels that could hurt one another or his career. “Some of the other guys—”

“Not on the road, I mean to me personally.” he licked his lips and stuck his cigarette between them. “You’re gonna be so much trouble.”


	3. Three

**September 1965**

It was late enough where they had to clear out of the club for the night or they’d never leave. Robbie received the keys to lock up and instructions where to drop them when the night crew tapped out, making a fine or poor judgment call (depending on who you talked to) that he was the most responsible.

There was a brief Hawks huddle where they agreed to sleep on the offer and make the decision then but that it probably did work. The fact that the other side was auditioning them as well didn’t occur to them by then. It seemed like Bob was locked in on what he wanted.

They dispersed and Levon pulled Robbie aside. He clicked his teeth, “Make sure the kid gets home all right.”

“Of course,” Robbie answered and if that sounded too serious, he added. “Can’t let the Toronto gangs get him on the first night.”

“Yep, gotta leave something for the second.” Levon gave a brief wave that seemed more for Robbie than Bob and sauntered out into the night. 

It seemed like the crew liked Bob well enough, but they didn’t get him yet. Robbie turned back, the taste in his mouth that lingering tinny feel, like the first time drinking cola from a can.

Bob was sitting on the piano bench, facing out. His arms bent back casually over the keys. Whatever sound there was had already faded. “Must be nice having all your friends in the band.”

He saw it, didn’t he? Why it meant so much for them to stick together. “You’ll get that too.”

“S’different,” he brushed it off.

They did their best to make him feel welcome, but maybe the inside baseball for how the Hawks worked was a little too exclusive for an outside eye. “It’ll take some time, Levon’s not quick to trust anyone.”

“It’s different,” Bob pulled his arms off the piano and sat up. “Cause I’m paying you to be my friends.”

Honest to god Robbie didn’t even think of that. Now it was painfully obvious. How insulated it must have been, how completely unreachable Bob was from regular friendships when his closest circle was on his payroll. When anyone who dared to get close to him had an agenda of some sort. It sounded miserable. How long had it been like that for him?

Bob pushed off the bench and came stumbling off the stage. As if one leg went stiff and asleep on him.

Once he made it down, Bob held his hand out to the air to straighten out his internal level. He coughed and said, “Must be getting tired.”

“Come sit down,” Robbie pulled a chair out from the closest table to them.

Bob stood behind the chair, perched his hands on the back of it. “Is now when you break into the liquor cabinet?”

“They did leave me the keys,” he sat down across from him and spun the keyring on his finger.

Bob’s smile bit through his cheek. “You know you got an angel face but there’s a bit of the devil in you.”

Bob’s heels were bouncing on the floor, he had that breathless mania about him. Trying to counteract his body telling him to stop. Or something inside him was rioting.

“Hey, rehearsal’s over. Take a break, okay?” Robbie could offer him brief respite from the act. “You sit in that chair over there, I’ll do anything you ask.”

Bob looked at him, tried to interpret on his own. His eyes gleaming, rendered impish by the offer. Then getting nowhere, he swung the chair around and dropped down into it. 

Robbie spread his hands wide. “Anything you like.”

Bob nodded to himself, there was an internal decision made Robbie wasn’t privy to. Then Bob reached out and gave Robbie’s knee a quick tap. “Go find something that won’t be missed.”

Robbie disappeared for a moment and then smacked onto the table two bottles of Coke which Bob seemed to accept, then he clanked down half a bottle of Jamaican rum and Bob’s toothy grin emerged, hidden only by a duck of his head.

They talked and drank like old pals. Rhythm and patter natural and assured. How thoughtful and kind Bob was, how silly and wild. Knowledge endless, his remarkably distilled creative energy boundless.

It felt like uncovering something in sand, out past the rocks on an empty beach. But the more he’d brush away, the more he tried to get his fingers around it, under it and uncover a true understanding of Bob, the more the sand filled in and pulled it down further.

Robbie so very much wanted to be there, to be part of it, how was he to know that was quicksand pulling him down as well? Inch by inch he’d lose himself there.

“I hafta go now man or I’m never ever leaving.” Bob slapped the table and pushed off it to get to his feet.

Robbie watched him head to the door, the wrong door. “Bob, that’s a closet.”

“Now I know I’m tired,” he opened the door and looked inside it. “Oh wait my coat’s in here. Say, it worked out.” He fumbled to get the coat off the hanger.

Robbie got up to catch more of the struggle. Bob had the coat in his arms but couldn’t seem to get the hanger back on the rod. Then his eyes went a bit glassy.

“Are you—” Robbie called after him and the next thing he knew Bob crumpled against the wall and hit the floor.

Robbie rushed to his side. Half a bottle between them wasn’t that much, but as he got his arms around Bob, it suddenly occurred to him how small he was. Handling shards of fractured glass. Then Bob came to consciousness and knocked Robbie away from him.

The way he sat up, the way he steadied himself...this wasn’t the first time. He straightened his jaw out and rubbed his mouth. “Don’t say anything to the guys, okay?”

Right away Robbie knew this was something different, this didn’t come from the bottom of the bottle. “Are you sick?”

The grimace that showed through Bob’s smile was painful to look at. “Just in the head.”

He didn’t know what that meant, and it didn’t seem like that was the sort of thing that allowed for more detail. Best leave it be, give him the cover he was seeking.

Bob reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tin of Altoids which surely contained anything but. He dug one pill out and swallowed it, then dropped the tin back into the same pocket.

“I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.” Bob whispered to cracks in splintered wood.

“Bob?” Tentative, just as quiet. The way Bob’s eyes widened to his voice, it was like he’d only just discovered he wasn’t alone.

“Sorry, was thinking about this poem,” he played with the lowest button on his jacket. “This dumb poem I read and became.”

Distract him, give him something else to marvel at. “If you like poems there’s a few unfortunate limericks I picked up from the road that I could recite for you.”

“Please don’t.” The thinnest of smiles but there was hope.

Something about him made Robbie want to tell him everything. Offer him a window into something that wasn’t himself.

“They make fun of me, you know. For trying to read, for wanting to learn about a world outside of all this.” Robbie confessed. “I love music more than anything, but there’s things out there I can’t explain that I want. And when I want something that bad, it’ll tear me to shreds putting it aside. Pretending like I’m not that person.”

“I know what you mean.” Bob stopped fiddling with his coat and gave a look to Robbie that seemed to wrap around his heart. “You should never be ashamed to be who you are.”

“Thanks,” he shrugged it off and thought about capturing that feeling Bob gave to him. In a song, in a vault. It seemed downright impossible. He stood up and dusted himself off. Seeing that Bob hadn’t moved, he extended his arm that way. “Need a hand, friend?”

Bob climbed up Robbie to get situated and looked up at him, his breath fading over Robbie’s lips. “Are we friends?” he asked, fingertips drifting across Robbie’s own.

“Yes?” Robbie was having a hard time putting it together.

The meat of Bob’s palm pushing at his skin. “Is that all?”

“Oh.” There it was.

Bob’s lips mouthed the same oh. “Yeah best not push it, ‘specially when I’m paying you.”

What was this feeling? This urge to contain what couldn’t be brought together. To give up something of yourself to quell some intense firestorm. To deliver yourself into the arms of painful desire. To touch something he almost came upon the first time he looked in Bob’s eyes.

But if he were honest with himself, and he tried to manage at least that, he’d know it as the elastic sense of curiosity ever present within him. He had to make a move. Or else he might never know what would happen.

“Billing hasn’t started yet,” he pulled Bob back by the wrist and threw him straight into a playful kiss.

He didn’t make moves like this, but Bob was an inspiring presence. He sensed more layers there than any person he’d ever met. He had to know what burned beyond the surface waste.

And why exactly Bob had an interest in him at all haunted him since their first passing exchange.

Maybe that was his problem all along, he didn’t look inside himself, Robbie only worked with what he’d been given.

Far too late to pull back, they’d probably been at it a half a minute or longer.

Bob kissed back with a hunger that boiled off his skin. Then his mouth went slack. His hands held the sides of Robbie’s head, his sigh hit the bottom of his lungs. “Careful, I might fall.”

“I’ve got you,” Robbie’s grip tightened over silk-covered skin.

Tobacco and fire, acid and fear. Bob looked up at him. “Ain’t that kinda drop.”

Back to his mouth, his lips. Tongue tickling the sides of his teeth, past gums. Kisses now gulps. A frayed live wire. He could devour him.

“Take me,” Bob breathed to Robbie’s neck, the hair on it standing up from the request.

If he said yes now, how was he ever going to tell him no? But then the opposite was also true.

So he said, “Get your coat on,” and took off to shove the keys in the lock, and he waited for Bob to follow.

#

A hasty locking and a fourth floor walk-up happened in rapid succession. All chatter had ceased and the only sound in Robbie’s head was a brush on a snare drum straight out of some sticky floored, smoke coated jazz club. A brief horn solo when they’d darted past headlights of passing cars.

Robbie unlocked the apartment door and Bob slid in before Robbie had a chance to hit the lights. He didn’t go far, just out of view.

Robbie followed him in, shutting the door behind and flicking the lock. He took a deep breath in and enjoyed the sensation of the two of them together in darkness. An encounter like this, how foreign. That unknown touch, unwinding with each fumbling connection.

Still he couldn’t miss out on those eyes, that face. Haunted, charming, romantic and wry. What might he uncover once he brought him under some covers? The chance for a rare glimpse of something inherent in Bob kept far from view made him reach for the switch.

One click and cheap yellowing light filled the room. A slightly dingy but clean apartment appeared, lacy trim and a dressmaker form stood out, as did the studio’s fairly prominent four poster bed.

By way of explanation, Robbie said, “This is my friend's place. I'm watching her plants while she’s away.”

“Ain’t too green in here,” Bob moved by the wall and ran his hand along an empty windowsill.

“Not that type of plants.” Robbie motioned to the hall closet, peculiarly lit on the inside. He got closer to the bed.

Bob grinned and shook his head. “Mr. Robertson, you’re leading me down a wicked path.”

Later when Robbie saw The Graduate and watched the first seduction with that under the leg camera angle in a medium shot, he’d think of this moment and these words and it’d be triple-pressed in his mind.

Robbie gripped the closest headboard post. “Hey, you asked.” He ran his thumb down the post and dragged it back up.

“Mm,” Bob’s eyes raked over the bed and lingered on Robbie’s hand sliding over the post. “I should go.”

Didn’t sound too sincere. “Do you want to go?”

“No, but I’m afraid to stay here.” Bob took a few steps backward.

This was the man who whispered a plea to take him a few minutes ago. Robbie wasn’t buying it. “Why are you afraid?”

Bob backed up till his heels hit the door, his hand stroked the cutouts in the wood. “You fish up north?”

Did he mean all people or Robbie? “Sure, they got regular and ice fishing. Fly perhaps. I don’t know what kinds or anything.”

There was a woeful squint to his eyes. “So there’s this uh, ice fisherman, he ain’t too good at his gig but he’s dedicated, you know? Only a little bait, ain’t got none of them fancy lures. Fish are slow in that cold, cold water. But every now and then he gets a bite, and when he’s sure he’s got something, he lifts that pole out of the icy water...and ain’t nothing there that was.”

Robbie got a little closer, Bob started up again like the words would widen the space.

“Maybe he’s got bad luck, or he’s bad at the hunt. Maybe he thinks fish catch a glimpse of him as they’re rising out of the water, a reflection all in blue, and when they see enough they cut and run. Cause once someone knows all of you, a person like that, folks’ll chew off a limb just to get away. Fisherman knows that, but he stays out there, fingers freezing to the bone. Hoping someday things are gonna be different.”

“Sounds like he needs to try another pond.”

Up against the wall like that, he looked so small. “Oh, he’s tried them all.”

“Not this one,” Robbie tugged at Bob’s belt loop and pulled him close. “Caught you.”

“Robbie—” he had more protestations but Robbie silenced him with a finger to his lips.

“What do you want?” Wants were simple, easy to follow. Always a direction of travel no matter how hard the road was.

“God it’s so stupid,” Bob fell into Robbie’s skin, he was out of hiding places.

“Tell me what you want,” he kept the demand quiet, a gentle urge for the words, and Robbie bent his knees so he could line up their hips, so that when he pushed against him it was the closest they could get through all their clothes. “Tell me.”

“Tell me…” Bob repeated. “We’ll never part.”

Simple enough. Robbie kissed Bob’s palm and slapped his hand against it. “There, we’re glued together. You’re stuck with me forever.”

Bob squeezed his hand. “You mean it?”

It seemed so easy. “Why wouldn’t I?” 

Bob couldn’t answer him, he opened his mouth and his lips worked toward words but no sound emerged. Robbie pushed him against the door and pressed into him, grinding into Bob’s body. Until he excavated that sound. And it came out like a song, something rising up from the bones of Detroit, Graceland in Memphis, forgotten soundscapes of collapsing cities.

Robbie grabbed under Bob’s thigh and lifted him up till he was off the ground. He got Bob’s legs wrapped around him. Once they were stable Robbie took a few short steps and transferred them to the bed.

Bob’s pupils were dilated, his breath acrid smoke. Excitement crackling through his skin.

Robbie cupped Bob’s crotch but found it missing the heat for any action. Record lost its groove.

Bob moved his hand over Robbie’s, still a bit stunned by the discovery. “I might not get it up,” he whispered. “The stuff they give me, it can mess with everything.”

“What do they give you?” Now Robbie was whispering too. Talk so low it crept under the baseboards.

“I don’t know,” half-truths, most likely he didn’t want to know.

“How come you keep taking it?” Robbie moved his hand away, Bob caught his wrist.

He moved his fingers away, apologetic for the reach. Words seemed to choke him. “I can’t stop.”

“Why?” Did he even have a voice anymore or was Robbie just mouthing the word?

Bob rubbed his fingers across his lips, like he was wondering how much he could take back. And behind the shield of dirty fingernails and ragged blisters of dead skin, he said, “It’s the only thing holding me together.”

Robbie felt the lurch of a battle drum. This was what Bob meant. Knowing a little was intriguing, knowing more meant you were cursed alongside him. That was a real fear he had, he wasn’t just stalling for time.

And in that moment Robbie realized not only was Bob afraid of others learning his perceived lack of worth, but that the same held true for Bob. He’d socked away some of himself and hoped to never discover it, if he did, god knows what would be next.

Robbie never had to be this brave for someone else. If he could rationalize it, move on, there’d be no trouble. It was like playing around a broken string, that was it, that was all it was. “We’ll work around it,” he shrugged in an attempt for normalcy. “If you want to.”

“I want to, I want you.” His words never sounded so true.

They started slow. Robbie took off his shirt, Bob rubbed his hand across Robbie’s chest and then pushed him back on the bed. He combed Robbie’s chest hair and followed the trail down, fingers creeping past Robbie’s pants to feel a hardness he couldn’t currently attain.

“You’re,” Bob started but then he couldn’t say any more. The way he moved, the curl in his smile showed he liked what he found.

Robbie undid his pants and shoved his clothes as far as they’d go down his legs. Bob went for the buttons on his own shirt.

“My hands are shaking,” Bob pressed them against his eyes to either steady them or hide.

Robbie took over for him, undressing him with care. Exposing his shoulder, he traced the lines of it. Seeing Bob’s chest, he kissed the concave center of it. Everything downstairs he stroked despite its softness.

“Do you like, I mean can I, can you?” Bob’s hands drifted to Robbie’s skin, scattered across alluring regions. His head, his neck, his ass, his cock, his chest, his sides, his balls, cock again. Lips to his own, the rush unending.

Bob gripped Robbie’s long, hard cock in his hand. He kissed the top of it, Robbie felt something flex deep in his thighs. God, was he asking a question a hundred years back?

“What?” Robbie squeezed his eyes shut, the images too vivid. Tongue sliding down his cock, black hole sucking him down. Fucking Bob raw, desperate cries of mercy, fuck him till he screamed. “What’d you say?”

“I mean,” he said it like he’d already explained himself when really it was locked up four layers deep. But then Robbie realized it was never going to come out of him unless there was force. “Would you fuck my mouth.”

The sting of those words sent a new jolt through Robbie, he met Bob's eyes. “It’s gonna be rough.”

Bob nodded with clear comprehension. Robbie grabbed the back of Bob’s head and guided him into position. Then he pulled him closer and Bob’s lips slid over Robbie’s solid, leaking cock.

“That’s nice,” Robbie whispered and pushed up further into his mouth. The sucking sound echoing on his skin, the feel like vibrations from an oncoming storm. “That’s real nice.”

He lifted his hips and created the rhythm that Bob tried to match inside his mouth. Robbie controlled the backbeat, tugging on Bob’s hair, his head, his neck to go deeper, to choke on a two-bit musician until he was swimming in his come.

He fucked him harder, harder, his hips grinding against his face, pounding at the back of Bob’s throat. Bob’s tongue working overtime scaling his length, popping over the top, back down to the bottom.

It was easy like this. He thought he’d come two times before but held out, wringing his hand through Bob’s hair, prolonging the note. When he finally did come he’d shifted positions on the bed so he was on top fucking the powerful well of Bob’s mouth.

“Oh god,” the release took everything out of him, he could feel Bob swallow against his skin. He extracted his tender self and tried to sweetly make up for his sexual brutality.

He touched Bob’s cheek, “That was amazing,” he rubbed his thumb over it. “You are amazing.”

Bob cleared his throat and went to move away. Out of fear, out of his own inherent loneliness. Maybe he thought Robbie was done with him once that transaction was through.

“Well if I lose my voice on this tour, I’m gonna know who’s responsible.”

“This isn’t just a one night only booking?” Robbie joked and saw the sudden flash of raw panic on Bob’s face. “Because I don’t want it to be,” he finished.

“Don’t fuck with me like that,” Bob’s breathy terror clear and solid.

Robbie held him close and rediscovered the beauty of Bob’s skin, the horror of his visible, collapsing bones. The wary, honest smile peeking through Bob’s glistening lips. As he explored lower, he found something else with renewed attention.

“Hey look who’s joining the party,” Robbie stroked Bob’s stiffening member, slowly raising in his hand.

“Little life in me yet,” Bob shrugged. Somehow he was more embarrassed in getting hard than not.

Was he turned on from being involved in a climax or from feeling that quick moment of shame when he thought he was used but not wanted?

“More than little,” Robbie got up and dragged Bob by the legs to the end of the bed so he could kneel on the floor. 

Bob sat up, curled his fingers over Robbie’s ear.

Clear directives seemed like the best approach. “I’m going to start with my hand and then when you tell me to, I’ll use my mouth.”

“Don’t,” Bob suddenly said, pulling his hand back.

“Don’t use my mouth?” Robbie didn’t follow at first.

“Don’t do this at all. I mean it’s one thing when it’s the other way around but…” something in how he moved, how he spoke startled Bob, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. Maybe the fact that he was being touched at all.

“We’re consenting adults.” Did Robbie really have to remind him?

“How old are you?” Bob held the question like a dagger, but one that faced inward.

“I’m…” how did that escape him, that should have been easy to answer. “Like twenty-two.”

Bob wiped his mouth. “Don’t want to put you in a position where you feel like there’s an obligation.”

So many people put him into this child-proofed corner, Bob shouldn’t have been one of them. But Bob knew how to hit when he needed an out.

“Why don’t you let me worry about how I feel?” If they were going to get anywhere right now, he was going to have to frame it in Bob’s terms. So he placed his palms on Bob’s thighs and told him a story. “Tonight I want to make you feel good, cause it might be a long, long time before you feel that way again.”

Bob touched Robbie’s shoulder, thumb sliding over skin much like Robbie’s over the bedpost. “Pied piper got all the right notes lined up, huh?”

It was the closest to yes he would get.

Robbie returned his hand to Bob’s cock, slick and hard and wet. He stroked him and watched his eyes flutter closed. Robbie built up speed and Bob moved his hold to Robbie’s head, fingernails scraping his scalp, summer breeze trickling through his hair.

Bob relaxed back on the bed, edging his hips closer to Robbie. His breath hitched and a noise ached to escape the confines of Bob’s throat. Robbie took the cue and brought his mouth between Bob’s open legs.

He thought about running on the reservation. How his cousins were always faster than he was, the wind carrying them forth, trees became blurs, and how Robbie’s lungs burned far behind them, the contents of his stomach crawling up his throat, wishing more than anything he could catch up and knowing he never would.

Bob’s hand tightened in Robbie’s hair, his other hand creeping into the air like he was about to signal a song until it dropped to his neck. He pushed up into him, gasping as he came. Like he’d surfaced after being a long time under. Bob fell back on the bed, struggling for the memory of breath as he fell apart from vivid, cascading ecstasy.

“Come here,” he could have said it a hundred times, fingers reaching off the bedspread. “C'mere c’mere c’mere.”

Robbie climbed up the bed and joined him, as close as he could get without touching. He didn’t know the lay of the land on the other side of this.

Bob brushed Robbie’s jaw, making that first connection. “M’sorry,” he held onto his chin. “Wanna treat you right but all I got is wrong.”

“What’s that?” he brought his hands back to Bob’s body, warming them on his skin. Fascinated by the exposed cliffsides of Bob’s hipbones. Stuff like that wasn’t normal, was it? He couldn’t compare this being to the fresh-faced kid plastered on those folk albums of yore. As wild as it sounded, he felt like he was witnessing the shell of centuries of turmoil.

Bob tilted Robbie’s head back to his own. “Everything’s gotta be a secret, you understand, but it can’t look like a secret.”

“Sure,” Robbie was eager to agree and dismiss it but then it seemed more complex when he reconstructed the sentence. He pulled away. “I gotta think that out for a second.”

Bob started to gather his clothes and put them back on, feeling vulnerable enough in that moment. “You know what it’s like out there,” he checked back with Robbie’s gaze and didn’t find what he was looking for, “perhaps you don’t.” He shrugged his shirt back on. “It’s the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”

“Is that from something?” It didn’t sound familiar, but it had that foreign misplaced tone to it.

Bob didn’t answer, he focused on buttoning up his shirt. He didn’t get far, hands still trembling from the denial of oh so many things. “Shit.”

“It’s not a problem,” Robbie got up and finished the work for him. “From the moment I met you I think I wanted to protect you.”

He kept his eyes on the buttons long after Robbie’s fingers had left them. “From the moment I met you I couldn’t forget you.”

The rhyme caught his ear just right. “You writing songs about me already?”

Bob closed his eyes but the pain within them was still visible. “I wanna write an Odyssey for you.”

Things were feeling heavier than they should have been. Robbie hooked his thumb back at the bed. “I should probably clean these sheets before I go.”

“I should stay,” he sighed. “Far, far away from you.” he consulted his palm, the one Robbie had claimed to glue himself to. “But I asked for just the opposite.” Bob threw his coat on and stuck that hand in his pocket, just about out the door with the collar up near his face. He gazed off the apartment balcony to the street below. “Cold nights ahead.”

He made sure to ghost the words at the side of his face, over his skin, straight to his ear. “Only one way to keep warm.”

Robbie watched Bob’s body tense from the words, the tension worsening on his exit. The start of a return to a tightly wound, fully concealed place. Robbie likened what he’d seen and taken part in as slicing and studying the inner workings of a golf ball. That tangled mass forever in the dark, if he picked away at it would he understand the mechanics or would he only succeed in making an enormous mess? And where would that leave Bob?

The next night Bob returned to practice some more tunes, original roles easily established, and at the end of it all his eyes turned to Robbie’s with that same special something in them, and he knew neither of them could say no from that moment on.


	4. Four

**February 1966**

Ronnie brought him to the South, Levon showed him what it meant, but Bob...Bob brought Robbie to Nashville.

Right away it was complex, the streets winding. Straight lanes would become turns. Restaurant shacks by skyscrapers. Outlined fading neon, sizzling in the light. 

This mix of contradiction made sense for Bob. He could make any place his kingdom and call nowhere his throne.

Robbie and Al Kooper had come in around the same time and Bob was insistent on showing off the Nashville digs. His room had a piano in it which was one of those upper echelon bits of grandeur. Request a piano and it doth appear. They tested it out for a bit, slammed some tunes through the keys.

“I’ll be back later, I promised some friends I’d catch them before things got really nuts.” Al waved and headed off down the hallway.

Robbie and Bob held a silent gaze that only got more powerful with the sound of each footfall growing faint and distant.

“Hey yeah, see ya.” Bob called long after the hallway was vacated.

Robbie stifled a snort of laughter with his fist.

“Where was I?” Bob wondered aloud, in a naive sort of splendor. “Oh,” he motioned to the door. “Yeah. So you got your own room and all, just off mine.”

“Looks like it’ll go unused.” Robbie’s fingers sculpted to the base of Bob’s spine, stealing under his shirt, seizing his skin and dragging him in till their hips had tangoed.

“What is it with you, huh?” he thrust his lanky arms up and around Robbie’s neck. “You come around, all of a sudden I’m outta control.”

“That’s true for you anywhere, with anyone. Limited time only offers of adulation.” Robbie had seen it in action. The way Bob could make believe an interest out of thin air. The sudden fascination. A refusal to let go. Then severe detachment when the moment passed.

Bob’s face indicated some great puzzlement over what Robbie meant and Robbie thought he’d help him out. “All those people you forge connections with: musicians, concert goers, interviewers. You’re telling me you don’t sample the goods?”

He was thinking of that room upstairs where the party continued. Ronnie and Levon paving the way, everyone else encouraged to follow. Pussy he’d been promised, pussy he got, with more options than an all night diner.

Bob grunted. “You got the wrong picture of me, man.”

He slipped out of the hold and retreated to his room, Robbie followed, calling out. “The exposure might be off but it’s still you in the photo.”

“You don’t know where I was a few years ago.” He didn’t explain himself to people, why would he offer? Why would he bristle at such a simple thing?

Where was Bob a few years ago? In the heart of New York City’s thriving folk music scene, no question there. Artists, poets, beatniks, actors, playwrights all mixing and making magic. Something like that anyway, Robbie skipped that scene in favor of corn silos and moonshine melodies.

But Bob looked off, like the unsaid answer didn’t fit right with him and there was a blast of cool air from a shuddering a/c vent which Robbie stared at longer than he should have, because when he turned back to Bob, he found he’d missed the exorcism and only caught the remaining bits of a broken soul.

Bob wandered toward the window, some Georgian thing with a bench and cushion where he’d stashed his typewriter. He clutched the platen like he needed to pull strength from it, then fed a piece of paper into the machine. He looked back at Robbie, face as blank as the page. “Was a goddamn crowd of people before I became this coward, you know that?”

“I think you’re exceptionally brave,” Robbie hadn't seen a lot, but he knew that much.

“Winter in the city still sticks in my mind. Here I thought Hibbing was bad. New York cold, it cut ya to pieces. Huddling for heat wherever you could find it. Waking dreams of huge icicles falling from skyscrapers plowing right through my skull to put me out of my misery.” Bob pulled the curtains back, watching as night tore the sunset from the sky. “Everything I owned packed into a guitar case or on my body.”

Robbie got closer, to try to see what Bob was seeing. Feel whatever it was he was missing. He found a stained glass window to stare at in the abandoned church across the way, a crack in its side, the paint flaked off. 

“Or it was my body,” Bob’s voice now far-off and stained like the glass.

He tried to solve the riddle. “You talking sex?”

“Talkin’ alabaster wintertime blues,” he shoved a cigarette in his mouth straight from the pack.

“You can tell me the truth, you know.”

“I don’t wanna go into all that,” Bob lit a match but it burned his fingers. He swung it to go out and stared at the blackened top. He seemed to speak only to the match. “Even I don’t get the truth.”

“I mean it, you can tell me.” Robbie struck a match for him and watched him drift toward the flame. He then lit his own cigarette with a methodical slowness and just when things went terribly quiet, in that uncomfortable silence, Robbie offered the thought again. “Sex was…”

Bob started slow, hoping to lay a trap, his own line in the sand. But the words tumbled past with enough speed he couldn’t hit the brakes. “A shower, a meal, dried blood under my fingertips. Bed for the night if I’m lucky. Sour and sick. Stains on my shirt, fire in my stomach. The stench of it all. God,” he watched the smoke wrinkle the air. “Winter was so cold.”

“I—” Robbie touched Bob’s shoulder and felt the chill of a graveyard. “I don’t—”

He blinked his lids heavy and slow. “It was currency, Robbie.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” he wasn’t taking that from him.

“I’m bullshitting myself right now,” Bob turned to sit at the typewriter and started banging out some terror-fueled rant that would surely morph into one devastating song. “Enjoy your room,” he waved but no longer looked.

On his own Robbie walked back the conversation until it had hardly happened. And he left it there in an unfinished state for a long while.

Then one night in Woodstock he and Levon were smoking on a balcony and it all spilled out.

Levon didn’t buy it. “That fucker sells a pack of lies any chance he’ll get. Didn’t he tell you he was an orphan? Or some shit.”

“That was different.” If anybody was going to distance themselves from family, Robbie could understand why.

“In a carnival, circus, something like that?”

“I think he borrowed that from me, actually.” It was kind of sweet, it didn’t feel stolen. More like Bob wove a tale for others so he and Robbie could share a past.

“How about,” Levon took a long drag off his cigarette, ash haphazardly hanging on. “How about when he said he was in a rock group and it’s some rinkydink Ricky Nelson shit that he was in for like two days?”

"He—” but then he couldn’t answer any more. Robbie gripped the railing, it seemed to shake under his grasp.

Cover of darkness, mirrors and a smokescreen, that was how Bob moved. He wanted to pass unseen into this new life. That required some history he only sort of had. But it didn’t quite answer the why.

What, he wanted to belong? To who, to you? And only to you? Robbie pushed that thought down as far as it would go.

“You’re right,” he said, lifeless voice scraping his vocal cords.

“You know there’s enough—” Levon shook his head. “Hell duke, I’ve introduced you to enough ladies of the night. Don’t you think it’s obvious he don’t fit in? He’s pulling your leg.”

There was whiskey about, Robbie found some and drank it in a quick gulp. “And if not? If it’s real.”

Levon flicked the ash off his cigarette. “Then music ain’t the first pussy he gets whored out to.”

“So you think it’s women,” he tried to be casual about it.

“What else would it be?” they shared a look. Levon turned back to his cigarette. “Shiiiit. Don’t make me regret coming out here, man.”

Robbie felt this twinge down in his chest. Strings pulled until they broke. Where suddenly Levon who was so very close felt a little farther than before.

He refused to deal with it at all after that, and back before alone in the entirely separate quarters Bob had secured for him—something that now he understood wasn’t for glamor or a veil of privacy, it was because king of the gypsies as this poor boy was, he knew the importance, the security of having your own room—Robbie had one last thought on the matter before he let it rest.

If Bob was all that, had experienced the fervent underbelly of lasting poverty in city dwelling, if he exposed himself to…all kinds of people and experiences, then why was he acting so timid?

Why would his time with Robbie feel like something frighteningly new? Having the same instruments as it were allowed for a modicum of experience, but he saw the terror folded in with the yearning. What of that then?

Because whoever he was before wasn’t a known entity.

Because no one who got off was intimate, no one treated him with a kind hand. A loving embrace. Saw soft lips in a broken smile.

Because in his own cryptic fashion, he’d indicated Robbie was the first. He was the only one who was that close, who made him feel safe, gave him what he needed when he was too afraid to ask.

He was the sole person in Bob’s life who’d never once tried to use him, so he remained the only one who was real.

Robbie had already begun to translate for him, understand the deepest rivers of his being, places no other person surely had waded.

He couldn’t stay in the room. He had to return to him.

Robbie entered Bob’s room and formed a layered apology, which as it turned out was so layered it did not count as an apology. “All right I’m not going to pretend I’m the only one in your life and you can think the same of me.”

Bob acknowledged nothing but the typewriter.

Robbie came up behind him and pressed his hand to the nape of Bob’s neck. “Tell me it’s fake.”

“It’s all fake,” he whispered and leaned into the touch. The keys went mute.

“I like it better that way.”

“Me too.” No tears in his eyes but Robbie could hear them in his voice. Perhaps it was theatrics, Bob could put on a lot of voices.

“Come here you.” Robbie took Bob by the hand and placed him on the bed. Then he made a grand presentation of reentering the room and locked the door. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Bob’s smile, perfectly imperfect, unshielded, unrestrained.

Robbie got onto the bed, straddling Bob and as his palm slid into Bob’s, he heard him whisper “There you are,” and a low note cracked through Robbie’s well-polished (though not as carefully crafted as Bob’s) veneer.

He had to regain control, he couldn’t let Bob get to him. He saw enough of those who lost themselves that way, trapped in the mire of who they thought he was, who they needed him to be.

But then again, Bob was stuck just the same as the others, only he was sinking faster. And no one thought to lend a hand.

Bob looked back at the door warily. “Be careful, okay? This whole town would run us out on a rail if they knew…”

“You mean if they saw our haircuts?”

Bob considered it. “That too.”

Right. The South was still the South. Gentrified but antiquated. The risk was high enough as it was and they’d gone and elevated it. Still, it wasn’t too dissuading. Not when Robbie looked down at the bed and saw the unstoppable force roiling inside Bob.

Bob traced the outline of Robbie taking great care along his neck across his jawbone, over his chin, while Bob’s hips drew upward for any chance of friction, stuttering, an idling car engine. Seemed a source of pure electricity needed Robbie for a jump start.

Robbie took him by the wrist and dropped his hand to the front of Bob’s jeans. “Touch yourself.”

Bob’s eyes seemed a shade lighter in the confusion.

“I mean it, touch yourself.” He adjusted the position and tried to inch Bob’s fingers past his belt line. When that didn’t work, he went for removing everything below his waist which Bob did not fight.

“Where's the fun in that?” he got one smooth stroke of Robbie’s hair, soft and slick, untamed but together.

“I want to see the work, I want to watch the show, I want to see you come.” He closed his hand and Bob’s hand beneath it over his cock, half-hard and rising. “What’s a fantasy you like to jerk off to?”

“Who needs fantasy when I got you right here?” He undid the buttons of Robbie’s shirt by batting them open, fingers of his free hand stretching over muscle toward warmth.

One good squeeze of Robbie’s hand over Bob’s, his sex now stiffening beneath their grip. “Do you ever think about fucking me? I mean real penetration.”

His eyes flickered to the floor. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

Wasn’t a flat no though, something encouraged him to keep going. Reverse the question. “Do you ever think about me fucking you?”

“That…” Bob swallowed, voice folding in on what Robbie could only guess was fear. “May have occurred to me.”

“As of about four seconds ago?” he offered.

“Yeah,” his smile sneaked in on the back of his breath. “How’d you guess?”

Robbie stripped Bob of his shirt and left him on the bed, nude, fully exposed, hard as hell, biting his lips for lack of cover.

Later on he’d have a better sense on how much time Bob needed before he’d come around on something. Here he had enough of an understanding to put the groundwork down and not push it.

Robbie laid down beside Bob and licked his ear before he pressed his lips against it and said, “I’m gonna tell you what it’s like and you can listen and react how you please.”

There was a pause and then a deep sigh. “Okay, but I might need a kiss to get going.”

Robbie bent down toward Bob’s crotch, heat palpable, erection straining for some iota of contact. He circled a breath of his air around the base, then licked the slit and sucked wet and sloppy at the tip. Two seconds, then gone.

“Oh not what I meant, but so much better.” He fell back to his own hand.

Robbie watched as Bob had to spit into his hand to cut down on the friction. Something Robbie noticed though he didn’t know what to do with was how Bob actively avoided looking at himself. It was like he moved to some other part of the room. Or he’d lock in on Robbie and live inside his skin. All to keep away from himself

But Robbie couldn’t break that down. And if he was honest, he didn’t want to. What he wanted, what he needed...

Bob’s eyes met his with that hypnotic whirl. If he had the right words, they’d get there together.

Robbie turned the light off at the edge of the bed and gave themselves a world of shadow.

He leaned over Bob and started spinning the tale. “It’s that shiny hour of midnight, a storm rumbles overhead but nothing seems to fall. Music from a jukebox rolls toward the night air. And you and your wanton desire half-lit.” He had to bring him into this. “I corner you, where? In an alley, in a dressing room?”

“My bedroom,” the words barely made it out of his throat.

“Your bedroom. Your most private place. I’m at the door, you've a quick flash of regret. Spilled gasoline at a station, you’re afraid you’ll ignite.” Robbie slid his hand down Bob’s thigh, feeling the fine hair, his quivering skin. “You’re not sure what you want. You’re starved for touch. Too much is already in motion and you can’t get away. You can’t escape me.”

Bob closed his eyes, head falling toward Robbie’s chest. “You are my escape.”

“We kiss and again you’re raked over the coals of the spell you can’t break. You want, you need, you can’t turn it off. You feel me, I’m so hard. I’m so hard, Bobby. I wanna be inside you.”

“Can I?” he reached out in the darkness.

“Here,” Robbie helped Bob’s hand to his dick, pushing at the fabric of his jeans, the zipper barely holding out.

“God, that thing’s gonna fuck me from here to Chinatown.” His breath staggered as he felt along seams tight from the restraint.

Robbie snapped the button of his jeans and let Bob get a taste of the real thing, unsheathed. He could hear Bob’s far more occupied hand move a little faster.

“It’s me, only me. Rocketing through your skin, filling you up. That’s the image you can’t shake. Been thinking about it for so long. It’s obscene, you fear, it’s too much to ask for. You claw at my back, you beg for forgiveness.” He was there, he was almost there. “Naked on the bed, nothing to lose. Alone with each other. Now's your chance, what do you want?”

A small smile, one he could pour into a thimble. “Ravage me. Tear me asunder. Use me and lose me like...like some fine French whore.”

“That’s your command?” So playful, not entirely on the level.

Then the smile broke away from his face. Truth too close to the surface. “I want to be loved by you,” Bob’s voice cracking before it was completely gone.

“Sure,” he said, knowing it was entirely the wrong take. But if he blazed by quick enough, perhaps the stumble would go unnoticed. “I touch your body, I open you up. I go deep inside you, lube sliding down my fingers. Touching and feeling and stroking. Tears in your eyes, rush of your blood. You cry out with the sense of the tops of my fingers to the hilt of the bone, knuckles pressed against you, they want more. We want all of you, Bobby.”

Bob whined, searching for notes too far from him.

“You want to come just from that but I make you hold out, pulling your hair, biting your lip. Feeling your body electric. And I spread you again and I push deep inside you with my rock hard cock.” He held him tight, feeling Bob’s body shake against him. “You’ve never felt like this before, you want it to stop but you can’t bear to see it end. You’re whole in a way you never imagined and the beat in the drum of your body is wailing.”

It was like controlling fire. He could try containment, but there was always the risk it’d overtake him completely. Better to light it himself, step far enough away, watch it burn.

“The altitude’s changed, sweat breaks out across your skin.” Robbie drew his thumb down the front of Bob’s neck. “My hand presses down on your exposed throat and you fight the failing wind to warn me how you're on the edge, I can feel it, you’re almost there, you can’t stop it.”

“Ah,” a sound rich in pain and pleasure, Bob stroked faster.

Right against his ear, Robbie growled. “I want you to come, Bobby come for me. Give yourself —”

“Oh shit. Oh fuck.” Bob fell back, gasping. The telltale sign of completion spread across him. He stayed there in a dazzling haze, eyes falling closed. In these quiet moments, Bob probably never knew how close he crested to absolute perfection.

He always could sense being stared at, Bob cracked an eye open. “What?”

Best finish the offer, since everything else had ended. “Sound good then?”

“You’ve made a convincing case,” Bob wiped himself clean with the help of some tissues at the side of the bed, then he looked over with a wild grin. “Did you say rock hard cock?”

“Shut up, you want it.” Robbie shoved Bob’s shoulder.

“I do,” he smiled, turning back to Robbie’s body. He hadn’t forgotten him in everything. “I do want it.” And he brought his lips down over Robbie’s dick and didn’t let up until he swallowed him down.

Somewhere in there before he was lost in that curious landslide of ecstasy, it did occur to him that what Robbie did with so many words, Bob did with none at all.

Later Bob stood at the window, cigarette alight, smoke circling against the panes of glass. He’d pulled his pants back on but hadn’t buttoned them. Arms folded conscious or unconsciously shielding his bare chest from sight.

That sound of Nashville’s nightlife ramping up, the thump of a hundred drums. Something about that drumbeat was pulling him back to the reservation, close to the fire. Smoky stars in flickering light.

Robbie had Bob’s shirt in his hands, he meant to hand it over but he was caught up watching Bob breathe. He seemed to operate on a complex set of pulleys, and though smoke came out his mouth in clear gusts, Robbie imagined Bob’s lungs filled with sharp tacks, something physical to match the obvious inner discomfort.

He could do something for him, he had to. Robbie got off the bed and came up behind Bob, cradling him in his arms. “You know you don’t have to be so alone, I’m here.”

He didn’t answer him, he made a lateral move. “You know you say you wanna write more but you don’t have words, I think you got plenty.”

Robbie kissed Bob’s neck, “What I said to you in bed isn’t exactly a love song.”

“Maybe it should be,” he murmured.

“Hm?” Robbie felt that notch against his heart.

Bob refused to look at him, but he raised his voice and spoke clearly. “You’re not Lorenz Hart, sad love songs ain’t your thing. No, I think the music you’ll write will be like you. Different, smoothed over rocks in the river, filled with personal stories that seem deep at a distance, but you’re not allowed close enough to check.”

Must have been the boxing lessons, Bob always came armed with a knockout. “How is it you can see so much?”

He took his shirt back and stuck on his sunglasses. “Got me a good prescription.”


	5. Five

**July 1966-1967**

Somehow even in the smallness of country living, it seemed like more things were happening. Folks making up for the muted noise. Crowding the quiet.

One of their first moments alone together in the unsteady lurch of the new normal Bob didn’t even look at him. He’d been staring out a half-open window watching the rain fall, the droplets crash and splatter. Nails scratching absently at the side of the chair, like he wanted to feel the rain but was afraid to reach.

False starts ran through Robbie’s head, he’d forgotten how to speak to him in his absence. From the accident. 

The thing that kept him going since he’d heard the news was a deep dive into his favorite bookstore, until yellowed pages coated his lungs and left no room to scream.

Most of the work he’d touched was the perfect escape hatch, knights on horseback, cowboys on plains, poetry, prose, and song. Then he was sifting through collections of poets and got stuck on something of e e cummings with the lines:

and what i want to   
know is  
how do you like your blue-eyed boy  
Mister Death

Words that instantly tattooed to his skin. His mouth went dry. And he knew the ghost of Bob wouldn’t leave him until he reconciled with the real thing.

“Liking the show?” Bob called out. He didn’t move his gaze from the window.

Run. This wasn’t a charade to be involved in. But his feet refused to move.

And then where there was nothing, words flowered from the stalks of his veins and poured out of him.

“Every day I thought about how I could save you, how to protect you, how to make things better. I’m sorry I failed.”

Bob closed his eyes. Robbie did too, the instinct to match him too compelling. Rain against the windowpane sounded louder.

He’d found the words scrawled onto a piece of paper discarded at the foot of the door, handwriting cramped and looping. Achingly familiar. Words he wished he’d heard straight from the source, instead of fighting the lines that nearly scribbled them from sight.

Your paradox consumes me/in a burst of consciousness…Everything is black/Not enough is black

The next readable section was halfway down the page in some run-on blur.

I see the sea I see it’s me I see sunshowers at my window how could I wish this how could I miss this how could I let this go...but then everything would keep on going without me ha ha ho ho how inconsequential time is 

He pocketed it. He meant to ask Bob about it later, but instead Robbie burned it in at a bonfire Rick and Levon started out back for drinks and dogs. It was easy to toss the paper in unseen, by then he just wanted to be rid of it. One could see it as some intense cleansing ritual, afraid the words would infect Bob further or extend to others. Maybe it worked because once it had curled into blackened ash, it didn’t feel as overwhelming as before. He didn’t think of it again.

Standing in the doorway, eyes open once more, hoping there was some answer, some hint he was still there. “Bobby?”

“I need to think,” he shut him down, then Bob shut himself down.

“Okay,” Robbie left the room and got stuck a few steps down the hallway.

It burned in his chest. Thinking about the parts of their shared past erasing with each passing moment.

The way Bob would pet down the hair on Robbie’s legs while lounging on the edge of the bed, how he called the look of it magnificent. The times he’d laugh and fall against Robbie’s skin. Drape himself over his body. Tracing lines on their hands for points that matched. When he held Robbie’s wrist and tried to see if he could find the break. Hot breath on a cold winter's night.

All of it gone, and unless he kept a good grip on it, the memories would sink down and drown themselves.

#

It took a long time before Bob was up to painting his face to cover the pain. Palling around in overalls, sunglasses to hide the pain.

They had the studio at Big Pink built by the time he came by, early construction but he loved it just the same. A conquerable land that was easily his. He looked over it and said, “This is great for you all.”

“You too,” Robbie nudged him but it didn’t take.

Even something as small as that, Bob strayed from his touch. Was it that he didn’t want it, no longer needed it? Was it boredom that brought them together or a lack of availability in other options? God, why couldn’t he just let Robbie in on what he was feeling?

Bob touched a few piano keys, boxed some amps into dead space, messed with the tape recorder, and drifted by the drum set.

In all his wandering around, appreciating every little thing, he failed to notice when he’d stepped on the pedal for the kick drum. It went off and he jumped.

“Man that was loud,” quick laughter disguised anything else. “Did you hear that?” he rubbed his neck and tried to laugh again. 

And suddenly Robbie could feel exactly what Bob was feeling, this intense rush of anxious trouble and masked confusion. Robbie squirmed alongside him.

Bob gestured back to the set. “That’ll, that’ll...yeah. Might blow out your sound. It’s too much. You should be worried about that maybe.”

“Pads should muffle it enough,” Richard said. “Also I won’t play ‘em that hard, promise.”

“Yeah, you got a real light touch,” Rick laughed.

“Did you hear that?” Bob asked no one in particular.

“It wasn’t that loud.” Garth told Robbie quietly, stating the obvious.

“Yeah,” Bob wrung his hands, he eventually settled on giving them one loud clap to end it. “Well you guys know what you’re doing. I’m dead weight, I’m gonna go. Leave you to it. Drums got a hell of a crash.”

He disappeared out a side door. First time in the space and he’d already sussed out the exits. It was a handy talent Bob had accrued to add to his arsenal of invisibility.

All Robbie could do was parse out the words Bob left him with. Too much, dead weight, hell of a crash. Crash, that’s where his brain was.

“He doesn't wanna test it out?” Rick asked the room.

Robbie waited, he didn’t want to be the one to chase after him. He didn’t want to chase him at all. But then as no one else had tact for the matter and Robbie did drive him out here, he might as well collect him.

“I’ll see if he’s still around,” Robbie said and wandered off through the same door.

This was an Albert job, where was Albert anyway? Albert could talk sense or nonsense into anybody, and held the temporary molds for getting Bob to be the right person at the right place and time. Or was it all stage magic?

And what was right? Bob had the right to be whatever he wanted not what someone else needed. So he went a little stir-crazy, got a little stranger, so what? Coming off of braces and traction, he was allowed to get lost so he could find his place again.

Robbie found him by an outbuilding, some wood shed or tool dumping ground that was locked up. Bob was doubled over, clutching at a corner of rotted wood.

Robbie stayed back. “You doing okay?”

“Ain’t enough breath in my body,” he gulped for air.

Didn’t drowning men pull their rescuers under? He coached from afar. “Just slow down, think about something else.”

His eyebrows furrowed asking for clarification when Bob couldn’t. 

Robbie spit out some ridiculousness. “Like lyrics to uh...Bony Moronie.”

Whole sentences broke in Bob’s mouth. “I’m fine l, I just need, just give me—” he was touching his chest like he was searching for something, like he’d misplaced his heart.

It must have felt so tight, there was nothing to loosen. “Your body’s in a state of panic.”

He stared up at the heavens, like they were to blame for this. “You think this, this is new?”

How old could it have been? “To me it is.”

“Leave,” Bob waved him away.

“I don't want to,” he clasped Bob’s hand and right away he was sure they both felt acid burning a hole through that hold.

Rick came out to check on them, Robbie just shook his head. 

Bob slid to the ground, splinters breaking on the back of his shirt. Robbie followed him down and knelt beside him. Waiting maybe, for a reason, for an answer.

But Bob couldn’t express himself, he couldn’t move on. In a quick burst of rage and frustration he punched the woodshed with a howl of torment Robbie couldn’t begin to understand, then scrubbed his eyes when he couldn’t keep the angry tears from forming.

Robbie fought through Bob’s weakened windmilling arms to hold him tight. “For the next few minutes, I want you to just focus on me. Okay? Forget everything else, it’s you and me. We’re going to the car and we’ll put all this behind us.”

No answer, by then he knew he’d never get one.

Robbie shielded him from any further views on the path to the car. As he helped Bob into the passenger side, Bob murmured. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” he said it confidently but was actually starting to doubt. A minor questioning, that was all. Bob probably thought he had to perform as the before self, parade an absence of injury. It’d be too much for anybody. That was it, whatever he was dealing with fell into the normal parameters of a situation like this, so there was nothing wrong.

Bob slumped down in the seat so that he was away from window visibility on their exit. “It was hard enough having them look at me, harder still knowing how I look.”

What did he mean by that? His hair, his face, the rest of him? Robbie chose to take it as the traumatic gloom Bob couldn’t shake, no matter how hard he’d smile. But he did think momentarily about the time Bob took him down back roads and quiet streets on his bike, knowing if he didn’t try getting back on a motorcycle quick, he never would again. How when Robbie wrapped his arms around Bob to make it round a turn, he knew he didn’t feel the same, but he only hugged him tighter.

“Personally I like the overall look.” He tried to wink the joke over to him.

Bob must have missed it. “I put it out of my mind, you see. I shove it all down so I can make it through each day. But this ain’t living.”

“It’s better than dying,” Robbie tried.

Bob didn’t answer.

#

It was fall, and every breath of fresh air felt vibrant and full, like the colors on the trees. It was one of those times where Bob was Bob, more than that even. There was a comfort, there was normalcy.

Wind snapped over shutters and Robbie got a sense from it like he was in a few places at once. Like he’d felt this wind before. Like...well, it was hard for Robbie to explain.

They played chess while Bob munched on a sandwich with brown bread. Another Bob, Bobby Fischer, had brought out the chess champion in everyone.

This Bob, Robbie’s Bob, was able to be just as hard to read through the board. It was hard to tell if he was playing high-stakes or if he was messing around. His eyes glittered pushing pawns over squares.

Robbie lost his knight, an early casualty. “You know I’ve been thinking what it would have been like if we went on that tour.”

Bob rolled the piece over his palm before setting it aside. “Can’t book you now, you’re too good for me.”

Robbie studied the board. There was an opening, surely there was something Bob was seeing. Bob went back to his sandwich.

How could Robbie tell if the moves he made were simply playing into Bob’s hands? How could he tell if it mattered? “No, I mean,” he pushed the bishop out. “Back then. If this wouldn’t have happened.”

Something shifted behind Bob’s eyes, “I can’t think like that.” Quick pawn capture.

He forgot Bob could make his moves off the board. “Not in the hypothetical?”

“Not when I’m antithetical.”

“Well I think—”

“Don’t,” his voice grew louder than he meant it to, he slumped back in his chair and toned it down. “Don’t. I relive it enough as it is. Can’t handle extra ammo.”

He wanted to tell him change was in the weather, in the leaves, how the crisp air made Robbie feel like somewhere they were together. They were happy somewhere in time and could make it happen here. They could make it work again with music.

Instead he watched Bob lose touch with everything around him. His interest in the game faded, the sandwich forgotten in his hand.

“It was just going to be about us,” Robbie finally said.

“I know,” Bob suddenly rediscovered the sandwich as a foreign object and removed it from his grasp. “Hey, let me show you the piano, it got tuned. Retuned. I guess I was banging on it too hard.”

Maybe if Bob successfully distracted Robbie, he could do the same for himself.

Bob led him over to the thing. He showed off a little, hitting the black keys with some force before settling down with some chords. He’d hum along with some nonsense words when he found something he really liked. 

He got in a groove and though Robbie knew he should have let Bob be, Robbie started to play in a higher key.

Bob looked over at him, frozen with the expression that could have been for him to never ever interrupt him mid-thought. But he said, “Show me that again.”

Robbie played through the smattering of notes, which all on their own sounded cold and cowardly. Bob wandered over and gently placed his hands on top of Robbie’s. Together they played for some time, Bob’s hands drifting back and forth to fill in missing notes.

He felt the pulse to stop bridge over Bob and then his own body. That was palpable, it sizzled on his skin. Then Bob slid his palm against Robbie’s and pulled him into a side bedroom, then onto the bed.

“I missed you,” he pulled Robbie in close, desperate for the contact he’d been shoving aside for what felt like months.

“I missed you too.” Bob's body was soft and sweet, missing the danger of before. Robbie used to think of touching him like clutching a handful of razors.

“I like this,” he fingered the beard that framed Robbie's face.

“Cause it makes me look like a woodsman?”

“Woodsman,” he pawed open Robbie’s shirt, revealing the thick chest hair that covered it. “Woodsman, I found your forest.”

“Gee, thanks.” Parts of his body he was self-conscious about were his teeth, the hair on his chest, and how others might perceive his darkened skin. Bob could ignore any trepidation and love every part of Robbie deeply.

“You’re very handsome,” fingers stroked lines down his chest. He nosed Robbie’s jawline, kissing the outline, taking in the smell. “It feels safe. Like you’ll keep me protected.”

“Always.”

He thumbed Robbie’s lips. “You’re still here.”

Robbie kissed the thumb. “So are you.”

Did he want to be? Both of them could feel it now.

Bob pulled away, “I’m not so sure.”

What happened to brazen confidence? That invincibility. Robbie knew there were bits of Bob that might never be wrested back from this sea of restlessness, but damn it there was still enough of him out there to bring back.

“Come here, I’ll find you.” he stole his arm behind Bob’s back and brought him close.

There was nothing like this high. Clothes stripped and cast aside, naked warmth. Bob’s dick firm, extending as it brushed against Robbie’s stomach.

“I want you,” Bob moved Robbie’s hand to his lower back, hips sliding up against him. “I want you to do it, Robbie.”

“There’s no better feeling,” Robbie ran his fingers over where they might enter.

“What, getting railed?” how his eyes sparkled when he was feeling playful.

“Being with you,” Robbie fell into a long, deep kiss.

He had to step away and get prepared. They’d been here before, when they traversed the lands with words unsaid. Never to great success, privacy on tour was limited, as was time, so Bob’s breathy requests to “fuck me, fuck me hard, Robbie,” resulted in the speediest of handjobs and once Robbie’s two fingers were on their way to making that happen but then Bob came quickly and loudly at the first brush of his prostate that they had to back off, clean up, and play it cool the next few days.

Robbie returned to Bob and took his first movements slow, cautious. He couldn’t rush this, he wanted Bob to feel good and in control of what was happening.

Bob writhed against his fingers, at first he was tense and nervous, but then he’d look at Robbie and find a way to relax. Robbie could feel that blood rush. He’d been a part of Bob for so long, but to feel him all around him would be a thrill he’d never top.

Bob reached out and palmed Robbie’s erection. “You gonna make me beg?”

Robbie considered it. Entrance slick, as was dick. Might as well make the move. He pulled his fingers out and positioned himself over Bob. “It’s gonna feel like a lot.”

“You best watch it. I’m a soft, delicate creature. You could split me apart.” Something wavered in Bob’s expression, and somehow Robbie caught it.

He shouldn’t have said it, he shouldn’t have said it, but it was all he could see, all that they knew and by the time he tried to stop it, the words were already out. “Bobby, you’re already in pieces.”

Bob huffed out a titter of a laugh, “Oh god, oh god,” and with the next intake of air he was gone.

“Let’s not do this right now.” Robbie slid down next to Bob and held him close. For a few wretched minutes they coasted the land between horny and distraught. A desperate need to feel each other and every touch a violation. And they waited and waited for things to feel right again.

#

For the most part there was a balance of better times and rough. And then there was one day he’d look back on and consider it the best and worst spiraling into one.

Four in the morning he made it to Bob’s place and dropped into bed next to him. Bob stirred, eyelids barely breaking open.

“Hey,” he started to get up, arms outstretched. Sleep keeping him in a witless trance.

“Let’s go back to bed,” with the gentlest touch, Robbie pushed him back.

“How?” Bob’s hands slid at half speed around Robbie. “I’m already in a dream.”

“Just lay down,” he signed his message with a kiss and they stole away under the covers. That sense, that feeling of Bob finding a calm against Robbie’s skin, a stillness he had nowhere else—it never got old.

Slices of dawn cut through the window and woke Robbie up, sunlight dancing on his skin. He had this image of Bob’s mouth sliding over a harmonica, hitting and humming a range of notes. The way his lips pursed, the way he breathed, that instrument wired to his neck. How he could take the whole thing into his mouth if he wanted to. He looked over at the bent sleeping figure beside him and couldn’t help himself.

“You are absolutely gorgeous,” Robbie gathered him up under the sheets and held him close.

Bob stretched, something popped at the base of his spine. Then he relaxed against him. “You angel, how you lie.”

“You feel so good,” he continued kneading the flesh of Bob’s hips, his chest, his stomach, “I want you wrapped around my cock.”

“Mm,” the sound dripped like molasses. “Coming on strong this Sunday morning, huh?”

“I’m not the only one,” he brought his hand to the front of Bob’s shorts, ran his palm along the length.

“Don’t stop,” Bob leaned into Robbie’s touch.

It never felt more right than it did in this moment. “I never will.”

Robbie stroked him with a lazy sort of pull, Bob let out a moan that stuck to the bottom of every following breath.

“You like that?” he asked. “You want more?”

“I want you,” Bob pressed against him. “All of you. Nothing more.”

No fanfare, no time to talk through it. He was going to have him completely. Square against the furnace of desire, flames licking at his face. He spread him with fingers and lube then pushed inside, Bob’s legs up, ankles resting at Robbie’s shoulders. Both of them with gritted teeth in their smile.

“You’re so tight,” Robbie groaned.

Bob held up a finger. “You rip anything, you better get yourself a private, discreet physician and say it’s your problem.”

“No it’s good,” that raw, blurry snap took Robbie over, he shivered. If only Bob knew what he felt like from the inside out. “You’re so good.” he’d hit that point of blackness where his brain felt numb and all he could think was inside, inside. The chance to go deeper, to feel more than before. “I wanna fuck you all night.”

“It’s day,” Bob squinted and nodded to the windows.

“All day too,” he tongued the sweat coming down to meet his mouth.

“I need you closer,” Bob moved his legs back to the bed and pulled Robbie down against him, the connection of skin on skin radiant and warm.

Bob kissed Robbie’s temple, how hot his breath was coasting over him in ripples. The seething passion. That internal earthquake busting him up.

“This okay?” Robbie dreamed of this. Driving deep and hard, getting Bob to that point where the mask would break and he’d collapse in this ravaged, undone state.

“My god,” Bob raked his fingers down Robbie’s back and closed his eyes and began to drift away. “I should—”

“You can come, darlin,” he stroked his cheek before he kissed it. “They better hear you coming halfway down the block.”

“Fuck I can’t help it,” he almost laughed but was too far gone. “Oh fuck,” and that first breathy moan that broke through the stagnant sex-stained air could have busted windows.

And the way it entered Robbie’s ears struck that perfect chord against his heartstrings and he was lost in an orgasm that put all previous to shame.

Robbie got off him so they both could collect themselves, not that Bob ever tried that hard.

“God I love you,” Bob was out of breath. “I don’t think I can leave the bed now.”

Robbie let the first statement slide. “I could think of some similar activities.”

“I can’t recover around you,” he held Robbie’s hand in his and kissed the back of it.

“Who says you have to?” Robbie answered, but by then it felt like they were speaking of something different, he could sense it in Bob’s eyes.

He rolled over, dragging Robbie’s arm with him so he could grab ahold. He didn’t look at Robbie, nor did Robbie try to look when Bob said, “Thank you for not saying anything.”

He didn’t have enough clues to suss that one out. “Um…”

“I know I’m different, not how I used to be.” he sighed against him, the sound of it restrained by how overwhelming it must have felt. “The guy you thought was something’s a whole lot of nothing right now. Too much of it.”

“Two things I care about,” Robbie started.

“Easy lays and slide guitars,” Bob tried, turning a trembling smirk toward Robbie.

“No. This—” he pointed to Bob’s forehead and then tapped at his chest by his heart. “And this. Anything else is of no importance.”

He stayed quiet. He let Robbie get up and get dressed. Acknowledging it brought this cacophonous overload like when Garth would overlap on organ sounds and it was hard to tell where up was. Robbie could hear that whirr pulsating through his ears, even before it came back around.

Bob said, “I do love you, you know. It wasn’t just—”

“I know,” Robbie sat down at the edge of the bed.

He couldn’t take the words back. He shouldn’t have feared saying them. “Wasn’t trying to keep you or trick you or nothing, I just needed…”

“I know,” he repeated. Robbie didn’t have anything substantial to give to him, nothing he hadn’t already done.

Before he had acolytes on tour, people who expressed their love for him, while others had their hate. Bob liked that Robbie could be strong and silent. Unswayed by good or bad. Someone he’d come to late at night to feel heat and flame.

Here, now, any expression or affection he’d take as pity. Robbie didn’t dare test it.

Bob pulled the sheets back around him tucking his body in so he could be hidden again. When he felt safe muffled between cotton and cloth he said, “No one warned me what it was gonna be like. After with a capital A. Everybody can talk about how that crash almost killed me, but what about this? Nerves waking up, feelings out of order, skin too tight, clothes don’t fit. And there’s stuff worse than that I don’t even wanna mention.”

“But you can tell me,” Robbie offered.

He took a moment, appeared to consider it. Then a twitch of his cheek, a smile he’d lost some time ago. “I can’t even tell myself.”

Robbie left him in bed.

Back to the real world. Back to that feeling like they were coming up as the artists they always wanted to be.

He started to separate it all into distant corners of his head. So he wasn’t fucking his way to a retainer paycheck. So his chance to create wasn’t hampered by guilt that his once in a lifetime opportunity was fueled by another’s likely suicidal breaking point. So that the things that Bob said to him or asked of him had no consequence here.

Things went late out at Big Pink. Music never sounded so sweet. Fireworks of percussion and fistfuls of joy. They found something, some place all their own.

He thought so highly of what they’d come up with he had to drive back out to Bob and tell him everything. The whole way back he was acting out whole conversations in his head, in some of them he’d drag Bob to a piano and play a bit, others he’d take him at his word and think up a late night celebration. In all of them he’d tell Robbie how proud he was of him and give him a playful push for holding out on him.

When he got to Bob’s the front door was wide open. He didn’t think much of it at first, the wind had gotten it or something.

“Bob? You awake?” he called out and pulled the door closed. Up and down the stairs, he couldn’t find anything. Maybe he’d gone out in a hurry.

He came back to the front of the house, ready to call it quits. He could sleep on the couch maybe, or down a few uppers to get back the way he came. It seemed weird staying in a place when the source of its power was gone.

Then from the front window he saw a body crammed in the corner of the porch under the swing. And he saw the butt of a gun.

Heart stopped, time stopped.

Robbie thought about the bird he shot and buried without ever telling a soul. It was this all over again, and it had become so much worse.

“Hey hey, Bob.” Robbie kicked at the body waiting for movement. It didn’t happen. He got closer and shook him. “Bob are you ok?”

He flinched from being suddenly woken. He jumped out of his skin. Eyes wild, lids struggling in the light. Sweat soaking his undershirt. Winchester rifle wrapped around his fingers. 

The way Bob looked at him. Like he didn’t recognize Robbie or himself.

“I fell asleep,” he fell over himself, struggling to get to his feet. “I’m sorry, I—”

“How’d you get outside?” Robbie reached for the gun but didn’t get it.

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I fell asleep.” he skirted around Robbie, feet quick to recover from that stupor. Old boxing stuff.

Then Robbie got it, he was in the ring with him.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Robbie slowed down his speech. “I came out here to check on you. Bobby, are you all right?”

“Why’d you come here?”

Robbie was starting to wonder why as well. “I did, I just did, okay?”

Bob had the barrel of the gun just under his chin, hand at the receiver. “I don’t know what the nightmares are anymore, if it’s the tour or the crash. I see it behind my eyes when I sleep, when I blink. All I want is for it to go away, like I went away. But I’m so scared.”

“Of what?”

His eyes darted around, unfocused, lost. “I’ll be doing nothing, washing a cup, reading a book, someone out there’s running target practice, cars backfiring, somebody shouts real loud, shivers crawl up my skin. I’m back there again and I can’t make it stop.”

How could he get him back? He had to get him back. “Have you tried writing?”

Bob’s fingers crept almost absent-mindedly toward the trigger guard, Robbie hated to think it was intentional. “I think people are breaking into my house all hours of the night, I don’t know if it’s real. Someone moved my things in my room last night.”

If he could just refocus him. “You need an outlet.”

“I’m so tired, so very tired.” Bob backed further away from Robbie and ended up trapped in a corner. If that move didn’t entirely capture their relationship, Robbie didn’t know what did.

Robbie thought of that moment early on, when he’d sifted through Bob’s record collection and he understood how closely they were aligned. “Bob, think of the music. You love it. It’s all yours, you’ve got the whole scene, you can take it wherever you want.”

“You think I care about that?” Bob yelled. “You think that matters? It makes me sick all over. I don’t want no part of it. I don’t want none of it no more.” He turned toward the forest.

So many crickets out in the woods, Robbie waited for them to take back the night before he responded. He kept his footwork quiet, not drawing too much attention from Bob while he closed the distance between them. Then, once he was at his side Robbie called to him. “Bob…”

“Hm?” It was a bit distant, but he was sounding more like himself. Like someone who could be reasoned with.

“Give me the gun,” Robbie leveled his voice. “Give me the gun, Bob.”

Bob looked down in his hand and felt the weight of the rifle. “You know what’s the worst? Knowing it was better before. That for all the waiting and hoping it didn’t get better.”

Now Robbie was pleading. “You’ve so much time, there’s a lot you have to do.”

“Yeah well, stuff it.” Bob clicked the safety off.

What happened next was hard to put in order. When he went over it later, Robbie had all the pieces but he couldn’t remember the timing of it. There was a school assignment he remembered from long ago, where several sentences were up on a board and the students had to assemble them into a functioning paragraph.

But here there was only dysfunction. The gun went off. Robbie grabbed the gun. Bob hit the trigger. A hole was in the wall.

If he tried, if he tried real hard, Robbie could imagine that when he ripped the gun away the gun went off with or without Bob’s help. But he wasn’t certain. What if Bob hit the trigger as Robbie got the aim off-center? What if it was delayed, what if something else happened? The more he ran over it, the more it blurred, until years after looking back on it he was sure he’d imagined the whole thing from a vivid nightmare.

“Jesus,” Robbie could barely see through the shock, his hearing also off-kilter from the blast. “That could have been my head. It could have been yours.”

Was the buzzing the crickets or in his ears now? Robbie clapped his hand against his ear, it didn’t make a difference.

Bob didn’t speak for the longest time. Finally he said, “Didn’t think it’d get worse than the road, did you?”

He really didn’t. All Robbie could offer up was, “I had hoped.”

“Take it,” Bob dropped whatever hold of his remained on the gun. “Take it. I have nothing left.” he walked back into his house. “Go home, Robbie.”

Robbie fell back onto the porch steps. He felt like that hole in the siding had gone straight through him. “How do I leave you?”

“It’s easy,” Bob shouted back to him. “Whoever I was left ages ago.”


	6. Six

**Mid-December 1975**

Robbie had been out working on a hundred things, feeling like his mind was in triple overtime but he didn’t know how to say no to a friend or to a gig, and in his business one was incestuously connected with the other.

Overworked every hour, barely sleeping. Night after night he’d struggle, only finding wisps of the somnambulance he sought. He stopped dreaming. Colors ran dull. Reality was only held together by the bridges of lyrics he could craft.

He stopped over at Shangri-La to reconnect with the gang and see how everyone was getting along. A lot of grass around, even the walls smelled stoned. Clapton was there recording, and though he hadn’t known it, Robbie was about to as well.

“Eric wants you to play guitar on this next song.” Richard pushed him into the studio.

“Yeah, what is it?” Robbie rubbed his face. For a second there he thought he could fall asleep standing up.

Richard wasn’t too invested in the finer details. “Something Bob wrote.”

Well, now he was wide awake. 

“Oh yeah?” Robbie caught Bob pouring a pint of whiskey into his coffee cup and handing it off to the next willing participant near the drink cart.

He looked...just about how he’d left him.

He went in to talk to Eric. “Got a Bob song, huh?”

“I told him I’d take anything. Really lucked out that he’s camped out in your gardens.”

There weren’t enough blinks in his eyes to cover that surprise. “He’s what?”

Turned out he’d been camped out in the gardens behind for days, maybe weeks. How did Robbie not keep track of this?

He worked on the guitar sound, Clapton’s advice being to do your whammy bar thing, though he did recall it as a wang bar, which was a whole other idea. Robbie could throw together numerous solos on his own no problem without thinking. But he was having trouble with how things were presented.

The chords were easy and placed on a gentle repeat, couldn’t have been more than a handful. Robbie needed the window in so the song could have a shape, something he could play that really mattered.

“What’s the tone, the feeling you want?” he asked just as Bob was walking in.

Bob answered without so much as a look in his direction. “A wail that drowns out a sob. Like you’re grateful for the pain.”

The words sliced through him.

**January 1966**

The knocking on his apartment door late at night startled him from sleep. Robbie went to check the door but didn’t see anything on the other side. Then he looked down and found the same crumpled frame he’d seen once on a coat closet floor.

“Bob?” he went to grab him and saw how bad it was. His face swollen in reds and purples, one eye completely sealed.

“I remembered where you lived, I don’t remember nothing else.” Blood and spit poured off a broken, busted lip.

“Come here,” he scooped him up and carried him to the couch, bumping into the coffee table as they went. A brief examination revealed the shadows of bruises across Bob’s bones, the hurt went deep. “What happened?” he asked but received no answer. “They get your wallet? Your ID?” he reached for pockets but didn’t get that far.

“You think I carry that stuff on me?” Bob snorted and ended up coughing, wincing through it.

Robbie went to touch Bob’s face and found a ragged cut still bleeding under matted, sticky hair. “Oh shit, here,” he didn’t have a bandage but he grabbed a washcloth from some laundry that was either clean or dirty, he couldn’t remember, and spilled a glass of water over it before pressing it to the cut.

“Ow, why?” he batted Robbie away with limited strength.

Robbie checked the cloth. Right, that was vodka, not water. Still, sterilizing had to be good. Then he wiped a mix of blood and mud from Bob’s cheek. “Just gonna clean you up a bit.”

“No, I like it.” The corner of his mouth trembled like he was trying to smile.

Robbie let Bob have the couch and sat on the coffee table. He sipped from the glass of vodka. “It’s not a trendsetting look.”

The adrenaline began to wear off, even the air felt sick. Robbie fed Bob the rest of the vodka and he seemed to shake less. When he reached the bottom of the glass, Robbie took it back.

“Are my glasses,” Bob croaked. “I-I think they’re in my shirt.”

As delicately as he could, Robbie brushed past Bob’s torn jacket and ripped shirt, lingering on the sliver of Bob’s chest, a bit sweaty but absolutely perfect. He kept the pads of his fingers there, feeling every breath that went by.

Maybe Bob was watching him, it was hard to tell. His working eye lolled and roved about, then drifted back against his eyelid.

Robbie got back to it, moving his hand along and finding Bob’s shirt pocket covered in slime that ran down the rest of him. Robbie gagged on the discovery it was vomit and quickly pulled the glasses free.

“My glasses,” Bob’s voice grew weaker.

One lens was completely shattered, the other had a crack down the side. “You’ve got one side working but,” he held it in front of Bob’s face to show off the damage. “It’s the wrong eye.”

Laughter quickly turned to tears. Robbie could feel his skin contracting in some pressure to retreat from the scene. He had to overcome it. Be the person Bob needed even though it was grating like an ill-fitting suit.

“Hey it’s okay, you’re okay.” he tried. But there was no gentle, there was only rough. He tossed the glasses aside. “Hey snap out of it “

“Oh you don’t know, you don’t know,” Bob gasped, tears clogged his throat.

“I know it all, I’m still here.” He could see Bob reaching for his hand and wanted to put something better in it. He got up and skirted the hold. “I should have some ice.”

He checked the freezer. there were trays but no ice. Why didn’t he fill them before putting them back, now he just had cold, useless plastic. He put them back in still unfilled, continuing the problem for another day.

“I’m gonna fall asleep now,” Bob curled over the arm of the couch and hung there.

“No, what if you’re not supposed to? What if your injuries are the stay awake kind?” Robbie pulled him back against the couch and ended up sitting at his side.

Bob’s one working eye found Robbie again with clear understanding, making Robbie feel like he’d asked the wrong questions, turned down the wrong highway. Even when handicapped, Bob hadn’t lost that power to see into people. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Blood and spit pooled at a paralyzed portion of Bob’s lacerated lips. 

Robbie reached to wipe it away with the sleeve of his shirt, Bob pushed his hand away, voice slurring over loose teeth. “Let me have my pain, s’all I have. Let me enjoy its horror for a while.’’

“Bob,” he was going to say ‘the stuff you get into is destroying you’ but changed it last second to, “whatever was out there just about destroyed you.”

His eyebrow found a little movement. “When I was doing such a good job on my own.”

How can I help? Let me help you, let me help, that train whistle sounded in Robbie’s mind. It came out, “Bob you have to let someone in.”

Bob uttered something, staccato and strange. But familiar too, was he humming notes? They were both losing their damn minds. Bits of his life draining out and he was gonna sing a song about it.

Robbie listened close and caught a few phrases here and there but couldn’t grasp it. So he held him close and didn’t let go and the song of sorrow eventually stopped. He could feel Bob shivering against him, his blood staining the both of them.

Tomorrow, tomorrow he’d strip him and clean him of congealed blood and street scrapes. He’d disinfect and bandage him and dress him in clothes that swallowed him up, and not once would Bob flip the switch to resume the life of the living.

He’d stay cooped up in the apartment, Robbie zoned out with the phone receiver in his hand, wondering who to call on his behalf. But Bob disappeared before any call would be made. And the next time they saw each other, it was as if this never happened and it dragged along unmentioned until it was forgotten entirely.

“Is this painful for you?” He could hear Bob’s lungs contracting, his chest heaving an unstable vibration that broke a path to Robbie’s core. He didn’t want to see him like this. He didn’t know why Bob came.

Bob didn’t answer him, he gave his shoulder a shake. “Bob? Bobby, what about the pain?” Maybe he needed something for it.

“It’s pain I want. It’s pain I know.” And consciousness seeped from his skin, then he was still.

**Mid-December 1975**

“Grateful for the pain, that description work?” Eric called him back to the present.

“Sure, done, yes,” Robbie threw out the mechanics of right-sounding words.

They tried out a few ways but Robbie couldn’t get past it, the way Bob phrased it. It wasn’t about playing the guitar well, he was drafting an apology through it. He was blasting out the lowest notes he could create to reach for him. If he still wanted that grip.

He thought about that diner in Kingston he and Levon went to. Must have been years after that incident. Jukebox playing old country songs and on came Hank Williams singing I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You) and like a shot Robbie knew where he’d heard it last.

The battered boy spilling his guts out, staining his couch. Singing a song of heartache and love. That was the pain he wanted. That was the pain he knew.

Robbie choked. He spit his swig of coffee back into the mug and felt Levon staring at him. “Coffee’s hot,” he tried.

“Yeah genius,” Levon laughed. “Coffee is hot.”

The last take on Sign Language wrapped up. Eric and Richard were going to celebrate with their level of partying few could aspire to and invited others along. 

Robbie was a little off-kilter from the taping, he’d heard derisive laughter coming through the booth and knew it was aimed at him. Took him right back to the schoolyard. Turned out it was well-intentioned and more in awe than awful, but the feeling couldn’t be taken back.

He cornered Bob by the soundboard. Bob had such a passive presence. He was there but he hadn’t switched on, warmed up.

“Need something?” Bob didn’t look up.

“A tent huh? Can I see it?” Robbie was comfortable in tugging on Bob’s belt loop to get him to look over at him, and once he did he felt the chill of the rest of the world falling away.

#

He followed Bob down the garden path, keeping his distance, hands in his pockets. “So how’d you end up in my backyard anyway?”

“Feeling that gypsy life, house renovation, nowhere to go but needing to be gone.” Bob spun around. “Plenty of cards, take your pick.”

He didn’t take any.

Bob’s next words were casual but terribly calculated. “Hey, thanks for joining on that last show, I meant to tell you.”

“Consider it a make-up gift,” Robbie said, but why did he say that, god why did he go there? “That Ruben Carter stuff is…” he didn’t have an end for it. “Something else.”

After they’d hit the skids somewhere outside of Montreal, Robbie and Bob hadn’t really had words. But Joni convinced Robbie over the telephone that hitting the Madison Square Garden gig was going to be worthwhile, and it was. He got to play spectacularly, show off a little, and fuck off before the man in white face could lay down any false-hearted apology.

They made it down to the tent. Bob’s tent probably came from a kit that had four to six sleeping bodies on it, but two adults standing were at their limits. Interconnecting rods appeared to keep the fabric aloft.

He had a cot, a lantern, his guitar, and a mess of clothes. Roughing it for no real reason.

“So did Eric want me to play on this or did you?” Robbie asked.

Bob looked confused, “I always want you.”

Didn’t answer the question, not terribly surprising. Maybe the jumble of all their past lives was getting to him, stirring up some semi-calcified ire, because the next thing Robbie said was a kick to the teeth.

“That wasn’t a song you sold him, that was a doodle. A ring around a coaster. You fed him crumbs. I mean it’s good, it’s fine, but it’s a bit of nothing.”

Song wasn’t even new, Clapton said he heard it back in New York months ago, the whole thing was recycled then abandoned.

“Yeah I guess it is.” Bob scratched a spot at the back of his head. “We used to like doing that sorta thing. Playing with scraps.”

“It’s fine,” Robbie repeated, the undercurrent of his words whispered ‘you’re better than that’.

Bob heard through to it loud and clear. On the defensive, nearing the ropes, he punched out with, “It’s been hard writing of late.”

Robbie had been battling a myriad of issues in the writing realm. He could rap with Bob on that subject for hours. “Yeah I’ve been fighting—”

“No,” he cut him off, “it’s different.”

Felt a little holier than thou, Robbie tried not to take it that way. Still, not the conversation starter he thought it was. So he kept his mouth shut.

Bob had a sudden recoil, like he’d caught the reflection of himself and didn’t like what he saw. “It’s the only thing I was ever good at, you understand?”

And what did Robbie have over him? The guitar? The Band? Was he even thinking of Robbie at all? Why would Bob bare these wounds to someone who couldn’t heal them?

Robbie asked, “Why’d you come here?”

Defiant. “You left New York.”

Robbie countered with, “You left first.”

Bob had that faraway look, unreachable, a little acidic. “I couldn’t help it, I got thrown from my body, excised out of stolen skin. Couldn’t call that prison home until…”

“Until what?” If Robbie didn’t tug at the threads, there was no chance he’d catch the color of the whole thing.

Seemed Bob thought it obvious. “Until I destroyed it.”

When Robbie thought about Bob, he thought about constellations that didn’t connect. Bright and incandescent, gently guiding, a wealth of conflicting histories. But Bob ached to be the blackest parts of the night sky, to be smothered in darkness, readily consumed in a black hole.

At first Robbie was enthralled by the struggle, then he desperately tried to quell it, but these days he’d grown tired of the bullshit.

So he corrected him. “You know I meant left. By physically left. You went to the Caribbean then back to Greenwich then I don’t know where.”

There was no notice to these trips, to these moves, it felt like a deliberate action. You tell your friends when you’re out of town. You tell your family. You tell the mailman to hold off on the mail. Where was Robbie supposed to fall? He deserved better than following hastily obscured footprints.

Bob sat down on his cot. “I no longer could face what I’d become.”

“And what are you doing now.” He wasn’t facing shit, that was for sure.

Bob paused, “You know how dogs go off into the woods before they die?”

Robbie sat next to him. He couldn’t think of the follow-up.

“You know why I came here,” Bob waited for Robbie to jump in, and when he didn’t he nudged Robbie’s shoulder. “No, you know.”

“Enlighten me.”

“I came here because I was pulled to you, strongest magnet I ever felt. Because l knew you were the one thing that didn’t change. But I came here and you weren’t here. My damn compass broke. So I didn’t even have that.”

“Shhh,” he almost touched the back of Bob’s head to calm him but thought better of it.

“Is there anything I can do?” Bob’s hand slid up Robbie’s leg. “To find you again?”

What was this, camp? Boy Scouts?

“I don’t want to fool around in a tent,” Robbie’s smile and laugh went unmatched.

Bob sighed, “I’ve been going out of my mind thinking the last time was the final one. That we no longer belonged to each other.”

Would that really be so horrible? Having some space, keeping an invitation open but removing the calling card? But then how did one approach that without everything coming apart?

“Come here,” Robbie pulled Bob down on the cot and wrapped his arms around him. Untangled his curls with his fingers. Felt him breathe, felt him break.

Bob buried his head against Robbie. Some words he missed, most he caught. “I’m sorry for what I said on the bus. I say a lot of stupid stuff, m’sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, don’t be sad.” That wave of tired he’d been fending off hit him all at once. “I’m...Bob, I’m just going to close my eyes for a bit, okay?” He gave himself permission. “Okay.”

When he played Saturday Night Live less than a year later, he got a Bob story from Chevy Chase. It was early enough that Robbie hadn’t yet realized that this story swap would happen often, that someday he’d have to shill Bob tales for his supper.

Chevy met Bob in the early sixties, in some small place with a piano that Bob was wailing on. They got along well enough and Bob needed a place to stay for the night. Chevy warned him he only had a single bed and Bob said that was fine, but what Chevy didn’t realize was that when they got home Bob climbed right into that bed with him, curled up against him, and fell asleep.

“You didn’t pay him, did you?” Robbie asked, joking but still incredibly wary and Chevy hit back quick with a “Please, for a fuck that good he paid me.” Robbie laughed until he cried.

Robbie woke up, mouth dry. Eyes glued shut. This wasn’t his bed. “What time is it?”

Bob switched on the lantern, shadows thrown up on the tent walls. “No such thing as time with you.”

He stretched against Bob. Sleeping in his clothes never felt comfortable. “Feels like I haven’t slept good in ages.”

Bob hugged Robbie closer, till heartbeats intermingled. “Since maybe we saw each other last?”

He hadn’t thought about it. Honest to god he’d been so busy that overlap hadn’t occurred to him.

“Maybe so,” he allowed. 

This was it, make camp or break camp. It was pitch black outside. He’d lost the daylight with Bob. The night seemed gone too.

Robbie held onto Bob’s chin. “I want you to know something. You can stay here as long as you like, okay? As long as you want. But Bobby…”

“Hm?” his lips drifted closer to Robbie’s.

“I think you should leave,” Robbie said. “Go home, yeah?”

“Oh,” he swallowed, inching backward. “Oh, hey. Well uh—” he squeezed his eyes shut and opened them, clearer than before. “Whatever you want.”

At some point it started to feel like any move Robbie made would have been taking advantage of Bob. But then, wasn’t that what Bob was afraid of so long ago, that he was taking advantage of Robbie? When did the balance shift?

He had to say something he had to explain it, he couldn’t leave him there. “I don’t want to hurt you more than you already are.”

Bob’s face reddened. He was embarrassed, something that he hadn’t shown for a long time. “Here I thought you wanted to help make the hurt go away.” He muttered, “Once upon a time.”

“We were never a storybook, unless it was Grimm’s.” Robbie thought that might turn things around, it didn’t. “Look maybe you should—”

“Find another pond, right.” Bob had a hollow laugh. “Back in the water, ain’t that something. I was too busy drowning to know I was wet.”

Robbie scrambled up off the cot. “I’m gonna go, if that’s—yeah, I’m gonna go.”

Bob didn’t bother to halt the cowardly escape. He rolled over on the cot. “You’re already gone.”

He was at the door of the tent, he was ready to walk out. “Shit,” Robbie grumbled and he could feel his heels turning but he wouldn’t spin around.

The next afternoon Robbie and Levon were shooting pool, passing the day away. At some point when lighting a cigarette, Levon got to looking outside.

“Where’s Bob?” he asked.

Robbie never had to look to know the tent was gone. He’d traveled enough to feel an exit from the earth up. “He went home.”

Levon snorted. “Bob ain’t got no home.”


	7. Seven

**September 2019**

Robbie watched the phone ring before he answered it. “Bob, hi.”

“I wanted you to know I signed off on your movie.”

He’d already heard from production but he didn’t need to tell him that. “Did you like it?”

“I don’t watch these documentaries, I don’t watch my own, I don’t like it.” Papers rustled in the background, maybe he took notes on it. Maybe he’d written out how he wanted the conversation to go. “But I got caught up in it. Stuff in there...was moving. You know me.”

Robbie smiled, “I do know you.”

“Did you hear about that other one they’re doing on me?”

“Your movie with Marty?” he’d watched every cut Marty had of it along the way, all the raw footage. Robbie would find his nails digging into his palms as he tried to tamp down the stray things he was feeling. Every few minutes another brick on his chest, and when Marty would ask what he thought, he’d try to say something abstract to pull away. Seemed to work just fine.

“Nah they’re doing one of those, whatchacall, a biopic. Takes place about a million years ago, some stupid kid going back to electric guitar.”

“I remember it fondly,” he remembered it as a short blast of pain, actually. He thought of lining up his body with a gigantic three hole punch and someone slamming their hand down to instantly carve out his insides. “Who's playing me? Who’s playing you?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Of course.” Some details Bob never bothered with, his head was cluttered up enough. Robbie let out a nostalgic sigh. “Man, the resurgence of the biopic. Freddie Mercury, Elton John, now you. What’s the common thread there, do you think?” Robbie knew what he was angling for, he wanted to see if Bob would say it.

Bob paused, then answered with a sly, “I really couldn’t say.”

“Hmm,” god, those golden notes still sounded sweet.

“There’s some stuff I’ve been working on, if you want to hear it. Maybe you could—”

The papers. What happened next was Bob reciting absolute poetry, terrific lyrics over to Robbie who took them in without too many compliments. He knew the line with that one. And then he found what Bob was really driving at.

He asked him to record, to play a little. And Robbie wanted to drop everything and say yes. But he was afraid, that was the best word for it. To start up again. Now, like this. And he was busy, he was so incredibly busy so he used that work as an excuse. That was a tangible excuse, easily understandable. Kept it open enough that it ended up as a maybe if it was further out.

Bob caught wise, the excitement dropped out of his voice. “Don’t worry about it.”

This was where Bob would hang up. Or in the days of house phones, leave it off the hook but still running. More than half-forgotten. Leaving the other end of the line to end it. But he didn’t.

“Oh uh, I meant to tell you earlier. I read your book. And I don’t—”

“Read those books, like those type of books?” Robbie tried. He started to play with his wallet, distract himself with something concrete, something real.

“Yeah,” a laugh almost sneaked through. “Hey how come you hold out on me on how you make your coffee from here into eternity, but you have no problem telling a world full of strangers?”

Funny, that was something he only remembered on the third draft pass. It must have stayed with Bob a lot longer. 

Fingers passing over bills, an odd coin or two. He summed it all up as best he could. “Some things I could share and some things I couldn’t.”

There was a long delay. Somewhere in it Robbie started to hold his breath.

Bob said, “I wish you shared a lot more with me is all.”

Brushing just past his ID was some folded up paper he’d carried from wallet to wallet. He couldn’t let it go, he couldn’t bear to open it. “I—”

Bob cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m gonna go.”

And Robbie was snapped back by the rusted chain of his words.

**October 1965**

“Go on get outta here,” Bob yelled to the air, then quickly pulled Robbie inside.

“I’m glad that’s still funny to you.” he straightened his clothes out. “They already don’t like me being around you this much.”

“Who.” Didn’t even sound like a question

He didn’t want to name names. “There's people on both sides.”

“Mm, Capulets and Montagues.” Bob picked at his fingers.

“Look how it turned out for them.”

“And how do you like it?” Sometimes Bob’s words twisted in a way Robbie couldn’t follow.

Split the difference. “Oh I’ll be fine.”

Bob looked up at him. “Good.”

This, this was the night he fell asleep in Bob’s bed and Bob woke him some time later to tell him, “I’d give all this shit up, if it meant I could spend more time with you,” and Robbie mumbled, “Alert the presses,” back to him and Bob just laughed and laughed.

Noise close to the room, someone pounding on walls. Couldn’t they stay hidden? Couldn’t they be alone?

Bob said, “I wanna play records and smoke and touch every inch of your body.” 

It was two records, one joint and though every inch was not touched, the inches that counted were touched repeatedly in a meaningful manner before Bob fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, asking Robbie what it was like to—something, he’d never know.

Robbie shrugged. “How can I refuse?”

**November 1965**

“You should go,” Robbie whispered to the dark, knowing the sound of crinkling sheets meant Bob was sneaking under them.

He felt pressure on the sides of his head, Bob was holding him together. It felt horrific, it felt safe. To be trapped like this when the world was falling apart.

Bob touched his forehead to Robbie’s and they stayed like that, locked into each other.

Robbie didn’t want to speak, he didn’t want to hear anything. If they could just drift like this through the rest of the night, he might be okay.

A lurch of pain, everything seized up and he knew he was making the sounds of trying not to cry, but he didn’t know how successful he was with it. Things were starting to go numb.

Bob wiped away Robbie’s tears before they tracked down his face. “I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything, all I ask is to be beside you.”

“It’s—” a huge sniff, like he could pull every emotion back in, “a lot to process.” Was Levon still on that bus, was he okay? Would he change his mind? Would he call or send word or would he get lost entirely?

“I’m sorry I laughed,” he pulled Robbie in and cradled his head in his arms. “Leaving to go work an oil rig sounds like something you get drafted for.” He tapped a melody along Robbie's back. “Hey, how’s about we wait till he’s working the job, then we go there and boo him?”

He didn’t want to laugh but it started up anyway, and he was snorting up miserable tears feeling just as awful as before.

“You like that? We show him the world’s no better. Then he gets a job at uh, an ice cream parlor and we boo him, we boo every flavor of ice cream. Then he leaves and we find he’s working where?”

Robbie had nothing.

“Oh one of those wacky windmill golf courses, and he has to fish soggy balls out of ponds, and we—”

“Stop, stop.” He couldn’t breathe. It was reality again and it hurt.

Back to silence. Counting his way to steady breath.

Bob’s voice came through so soft and tender. “You don’t have any brothers or sisters, do you?”

“No,” he quickly corrected himself. “No, Levon’s my brother.” Levon was the only one who made sense sometimes, who showed them where to go, and he was the only one who could take care of them—onstage, in a fight, at home. “We’re one unit, we’re a family, and he left without even thinking about how he was leaving us behind.”

“It’s a rotten move,” Bob agreed.

He said it so Bob didn’t have to. “One you’d never pull, huh?” he sat up. “Not like you’d want to cut out on this tour or anything.”

There was a brave front but that’s all it was, a front. Would they keep going like this, on and on and on, waiting for the next to break?

“Right, I didn’t tell you. I left already. This is the replacement me. He’s all right, but I think the nose is off. Too phony-looking.” Bob nuzzled at Robbie’s neck, trying to draw him back in. When that didn’t work, he changed tactics. Bob wrested Robbie’s chin his way. “Hey,” demanding, then light. “Hey, I could never leave you behind.”

Sometimes Bob could be so shy, he had moves at his disposal to use anytime but he wouldn’t push it. He’d wait till Robbie initiated before really getting started. But here he understood Robbie didn’t have his shit together anymore. All he had was packed on a bus to the furthest point imaginable, far away and long gone.

So Bob provided the momentary distraction. He kissed Robbie. Small and sweet at first, building to something wondrous and free.

It didn’t have to go further than that.

Robbie pulled back under the covers. “I’d never leave you like that, you know.”

Bob saw straight through him. He whispered, “But you will leave.”

**November 25 1976**

“Go away,” Bob yelled to the knock at the door, Robbie came in just the same. “Oh it’s you.” He grinned and turned back to the piano. “How is it out there?”

About a billion and one things were fighting for time in Robbie’s head about The Last Waltz, so Robbie chose to tailor and condense the news to Bob. “Levon’s on about how there should be cameras on rehearsals, you and a piano a sight to see.”

Bob stifled any rife concern. “What makes him think I’d want more cameras on me?” he played the piano louder.

“He’s finding ways to cause a stir,” Robbie sat down next to Bob but faced out. “We’re not as close as we used to be.”

Same held true for a lot of people and Robbie, now that he thought about it. How did his own world get so small?

“Been like that for a while,” Bob spun around on the piano bench so he was sitting next to Robbie. “What’s this?”

“It’s a scarf,” was Bob really going to school him on fashion?

“Don’t you think that’s redundant?” Bob tugged it loose and the fabric flowed over his fingers.

“Why would it be?”

“Cause you’re like a human scarf,” he used the end of it to tickle Robbie’s ear.

Robbie snatched it back from him. “You’re just looking to be tied up.”

Bob bit down on his smile and nodded.

“God, how are we going to do this?” Robbie put his head in his hands, it was getting overwhelming. One person wasn’t meant to carry this kind of weight.

Bob scratched circles on Robbie’s back, then he swung a leg around so he could straddle the bench and rub up on Robbie. “A show’s a show.”

He would think like that, wouldn’t he? Robbie cracked a smile. “You know I think back to those first shows with you where it was the first time Levon and I heard a crowd react so violently. Just utter hatred. We were so confused, angry, ready to go home for good. And I remember seeing you afterwards, how excited you were, that you thought it was great. I don’t know how you felt that way, I still don’t.”

“Seriously?” Bob hung his chin on Robbie’s shoulder blade. “You didn’t figure me out? You weren’t trying.”

“I suppose you loved the music you were making, it didn’t matter how anyone else felt.” Robbie gave him the answer he’d stumbled upon over the years.

He put it as simply as he could. “I loved that I was making it with you.”

“Stop it,” revisionist history, Bob was the king of manufacturing tales.

“I’ve tried,” he kissed Robbie’s neck. “Lord, I've tried.” Teeth nipping at his skin.

Robbie got up and paced the floor, partly from show anxiety, partly to release himself from Bob’s hold. Bob was working the distraction angle, make him feel good to forget the trouble. Maybe both of them needed it, but Robbie couldn’t handle that kind of complication. Not on top of everything else.

He went back to the conversation that made sense. “We have this night to celebrate, and I’m juggling a hundred things and another song to write, and Levon’s after me on how could I possibly ask Neil Diamond to play with us. I mean, it’s Neil Diamond.”

“Levon’s sore cause this is a change you made that affects them. I know they agreed to it and are having fun with it, but it’s sorta like you’re selling the family farm but you’re letting them help find the new digs. You dig?”

“We can’t—” That broke his stride. “Bob we can’t go on how we were living.”

“I know.”

“You were there, you saw how it was. You agreed.”

“I did,” Bob said. “But I also know it’s sure as hell hard to let go.”

“The only way I could see keeping The Band together, keeping them alive was to say goodbye. To the road, to that toxic lifestyle. Sayonara to the scene. It’s the only card I could play.” Honestly he didn’t think he’d have to convince people more than once, the first time was hard enough. “I mean, I want to stay alive. I’m not sure they do.”

Bob had this private conference with himself. Whatever Robbie had said held some open sesame phrase unlocking hidden secrets.

Robbie frowned. “What?”

“That’s why you said goodbye to me.” Absolute understanding in his voice, clear confirmation.

“I didn’t—”

“You never wanted to love me, it was too much risk for you.” Bob slid back around to face the piano.

Robbie scoffed, “That’s unfair.”

“Sure was to me,” he played out some minor chords, acting like he’d moved on when he was blaring a melancholy mood for all to hear.

Robbie pinched the bridge of his nose, the headache of the day increased tenfold. “I can’t think about this right now.”

“Wasn’t asking you to,” Bob was fully entrenched in the piano, just as he’d found him before. Time went and pulled the rug out from under him.

His pulse pounded at his ears. Robbie needed to grab some aspirin, at least part of the problem could be fixed. “Later okay? Later.” 

Bob grunted in response. They both knew there wouldn’t be a later.

**September 2019**

Robbie pulled the phone away from his face but the call was still connected. “Bob?”

“It ain’t easy letting you go, you know.”

They stayed on the phone, just breathing. Robbie worked through a response in his head.

Finally he answered with “I never wanted to,” but when he checked the screen again the phone call had ended some time before.


	8. Eight

**January 1972**

The nicest moments he had of them together could fit in a carry-on suitcase. That time they walked on the beach at dawn, the sky painted with a melting popsicle of summer, and Bob dragged him into the surf showing him this private inlet, and they kissed as waves crashed all around. New York nights when artistry reigned, parties were small, and the boundless love and energy Bob had could be felt across state lines. That one night when they were snowed in and it was cigarettes and hot chocolate, Robbie playing guitar while Bob’s arms were draped around him, Bob’s lips to Robbie’s skin like timid taps at his typewriter.

More often were the times he felt like they were in between something that felt so right and a knife twisting through his guts. January first, the Rock of Ages gig exploded in the air, an unending comet, a whizbang high.

The two of them headed back to Bob’s place in an animated post show walk and talk, the blocks just flew past.

Bob spoke of the night as if it were a painting, since he’d gotten into creating on canvases so much filtered and flowed through that perception. But it was never about colors or feeling or even materials, things Robbie knew painters conversed on. With Bob it was physical: what was depicted, what wasn’t, what was missing he couldn’t live without.

Capturing this night in a painting was no different. Very surreal, very Picasso. Robbie’s figure he described with guitar strings like veins and electric wires fusing lines, Robbie the robot once more.

They scampered into bed and talked until their tongues just about fell off. Everything was coming together and it felt just like before, when everything they wanted could be captured if they made sure to reach for it, and their problems were lighter than air.

What a dream, Robbie kept thinking, what a wonderful dream. He swore their foreheads touched as they finally fell asleep, dead tired.

He woke to Bob gliding over him, pressing against him. Curious hands and trembling lips sinking into his skin.

“Did you have an appointment?” Robbie cracked an eye open. 

“Yeah it’s way overdue,” that open, free smile, that sense of mischief. “Should have jumped your bones yesterday seeing you like that. So powerful, so absolute, doing the thing you’re meant to be doing.”

“I could say the same of you,” he could feel Bob’s hands playing with the back of his head. “Hey, get out of my hair.”

“I like it,” he cooed. “Cause I can do stuff like this.” Bob grabbed the hair at the back of Robbie’s neck and pulled him in for a long kiss, whole stanzas in an epic poem.

“Mm,” Robbie ended the liplock and felt along Bob’s facial hair.

“What?” His laugh was soft, buttery.

“Nothing it’s…” Could he put it into words? It was a picture in a frame, it wasn’t a fully formed thought. “Kissing you with a moustache, touching your beard made me wonder what it was like for you with me.”

He thought back. “Didn’t bother me none, though sometimes you coulda used a whisker trim.” Bob shrugged. “I wasn’t gonna say nothing, your whole crew was into the backwoods scene.”

“Thanks,” he took offense far after the fact.

“I’m never gonna not love kissing you,” his lips came back to Robbie’s, his hand caressed the front of Robbie’s briefs.

He could feel his body responding, that surge of electricity stemming from Bob’s touch. He could light him up just like that. “Where are we going?” he asked breathlessly.

“Paradise, one-way ticket.” Bob climbed on top of Robbie. “Well maybe a few ways.” He laughed.

Their bodies bending against each other, Robbie pushing up onto Bob, hands sliding and grasping. Robbie feeling half asleep made the moment dreamy, ethereal.

How confident Bob was in drawing this out of him, rocking his body, rolling his hips. He savored each sound he could pull from Robbie. Wet, already sticky with sweat, wrists and fists worked together to pleasure each other in tandem.

“Don’t stop,” Bob purred and Robbie had to bite Bob’s shoulder to keep from coming then and there.

Their bodies pressed together, sprawled over the bed, toes curling against the bedsheets. He could hear Bob starting to falter, and used the momentum to finish them both off, feeling the rush of an unbeatable high and the ache of spent passion.

Still and sore, the sun shining down on them. Music bled over from a nearby apartment, tinny and twangy through the vents.

He caught a view of the calendar on the wall, which hadn’t been updated in several months. “New day, new year.” Robbie remarked. “What are you gonna do with it?”

“I ain’t doing nothing.” Bob pulled a blanket up over his head.

Robbie met him under the blanket. “I’m not surprised.”

“I’m not surprised you’re not surprised,” Bob blew Robbie’s hair out of his face. “Cause you always want to be part of something and you can’t miss out.”

“And you’re not interested in the world out there, too much is going on inside your head.”

Both were true, weren’t they? It was why they could only connect in fits and bursts, it didn’t match the rest of the time. They were two different people.

Bob nodded, having quickly resigned to the state of usual things. He pushed the blanket off both of them. “It’s all right, you can go. After a show like that the whole world is looking for you.”

“The whole world,” Robbie hooked his arm underneath Bob, “can wait.”

He could see the excitement flash in Bob’s eyes. “You making coffee?”

“Yeah I’ll make breakfast too, how about that?”

Bob took the offer seriously. “Might be some eggs in the fridge, can’t think of what else.”

“I make a mean omelet,” Robbie wheedled.

“I bet you do,” Bob laughed and looped his arms around Robbie’s neck, kissing him through a powerful, genuine grin.

A few more kisses and they were back in it, engines revved. Blowtorch on their skin cutting through the ice around them. Robbie let himself get lost for another hour or so. Because when you wanted to get lost, Bob was the Bermuda Triangle.

Robbie had the habit of cleaning up other people’s places. Leave him in a space long enough and he’d try to make it better than it was. Bob’s digs could use the help.

Bob was so shy in moving around his place, a man who could warp the gravity in any room he entered. He watched Robbie work from the sides of doorways, from around corners. He shuffled across the floor like he’d forgotten directions on where he was going.

Bob handed over a folded scrap of paper, stuffed it right in Robbie’s hand. “I wrote this some time ago, always meant to write more. Think you should have it. Can’t look at it any longer.”

“I’ll cherish it,” Robbie put it in his shirt pocket. He knew reading it in front of Bob would be too much on both sides, so he held off.

Bob dragged over a few blankets and collapsed on the couch. A television near the wall helped for noise, sounded like Golden Age Hollywood. Robbie sat down beside him and pretty soon Bob was laying over him, head in Robbie’s lap. Robbie’s arm hung over Bob’s torso and Bob reached his hand there to connect and all at once the picture felt complete. There they stayed, quiet and still.

At some point, Robbie said, “I’d have thought your phone would be ringing off the hook.”

Bob smiled. “It helps if the phone is already off the hook, off the wires, out of the wall...”

Black and white movies from the nineteen thirties and forties played on the small set. Bob could point at any piano player or drummer or dancer in the back of a club scene and rattle off tales of the silver screen, stuff Robbie could only dream of. And in that moment he realized that they weren’t too different, they were too alike.

Robbie looked out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of a nearby clock. Then he realized he had a watch on his wrist. Time was long gone. He edged his leg out from under Bob’s head. “Hey.”

“Hm?” Bob was his most innocent self when he was sleepy or sick.

“Hey, I gotta go.” Robbie squeezed around Bob and pulled on his coat.

“Thanks for the memory,” Bob winked and turned back to the blankets.

And just then the Bob Hope movie they’d been watching said the same words in song. It made the whole thing dip into dream territory.

Soon Robbie was back listening to the recordings of the last evening with John Simon. What needed tweaked, what was bang on, the first review held so much excitement and dread. Feeling that whole show from a different angle.

Coming to the close of songs, right about when the lights were out and Bob was taking the stage, John said, “Listen to this. You can feel that surprise along with the audience.”

Robbie reached into his shirt pocket and unfolded the piece of paper. Jaime was written on one side, the other side said:

Had we never loved so kindly  
Had we never loved so blindly  
Never met, never parted  
We’d never have been broken hearted

He took great care to fold it back just as it was and stuck it in his wallet, so he wouldn’t lose it. He could deal with the stew of emotions that was roiling up later if he remembered to unearth them.

“You feel that?” John asked and Robbie could only nod in agreement.


	9. Nine

**December 4 1975**

He didn’t want to admit he missed most of the show. He had arrived painfully early and regretted it almost instantly, so he hung around Shaughnessy Village coffee shops until he felt strong enough. That was the thing, he had to shore up his sides so there was no chance he’d be pulled into Bob’s orbit.

He came through the back, more loading dock than stage door. Robbie could hear the band in full swing, the song he couldn’t identify.

He bumped into Ratso Sloman, who gave him his opinion on all the happenings, not that Robbie had asked. The most interesting thing that was sandwiched into a whole lot of nonsense was that he learned Bob was sneaking French into a few songs.

French, the ruse of a language lesson they’d use so they’d be sure to see one another every so often.

For the show it was a gimmick, it was a playful nod, it was an appreciative gesture, it was Bob entertaining himself so as not to get too bored. 

But what became immediately obvious to Robbie was that Bob came to Montreal and broadcast their secret code like a homing beacon. It stirred something inside him and sickened him just the same. 

At the show’s end, Robbie hugged the wall and kept his head down. Completely unnoticed by everyone who passed by him, including Bob. Better that way, he could break the spell before it was cast.

He’d already gotten the directions to Bob’s dressing room but he was holding back. That high at the end of a show, the adrenaline, the crowd, everything fueling an amped-up invincibility. If he came too close to it, that kind of power, he was a goner for sure.

He had to time it right. So he waited and waited until the beats seemed slower, noise of the audience fading away, roadies wrapping up cords. And he straightened his spine before opening that dressing room door.

There Bob was, scrubbing his painted face clean in front of a mirror. His hat on the counter beside him. 

And Robbie realized the biggest mistake he made that night. He shouldn’t have fooled himself, thinking more time would have saved him. There was no getting around it. The second he saw Bob, he fell for him all over again.

Bob caught his eyes in the mirror. That striking mix of impish exuberance and a terrible yearning, present in both.

“French?” was all Robbie could get out.

“French,” Bob confirmed.

With that out of the way, he could find his voice again. He could paste his confidence back together, let the seams dry before anyone saw.

“You astound me,” Robbie walked up behind him. “You really are a boxer at heart, you know that? Every time I think you’re in one place, you’re somewhere else. Changing your moves when you think they’re onto you. Quick. Brash. Bleeding for your passion.”

Bob hid his smile under a wipe of the greasepaint covered rag. “All right, you’ve knocked me out. Come collect your prize already.”

“You’re all I need,” Robbie pulled back Bob’s shirt collar and licked and sucked along the cords of Bob’s neck.

Bob’s low giggle erupted in shades of mahogany. He missed that sound, that familiar scent of sweat. He missed a life they never found together.

Robbie’s hand twisted around for a better feel, Bob laced his fingers through it and held on tight.

There was the bustle of the caravan collecting the gear, readying themselves for the road. Tent pole down, canvas rolled up, time to get the show on the road. It felt so terribly familiar, Robbie was afraid to call it home.

Robbie brushed up against the mess of curls on Bob’s head, he could get lost in there. Quiet now, up against Bob’s ear, he whispered, “No matter when you change or how you change, I still find you the most beautiful soul and I’ll never forget the spark I feel when our hands meet. When your lips touch mine.”

And he kissed him like he could pull that charge out of him. Like he didn’t need anything else but this moment.

“Stay,” Bob pulled away, breathless. “Bus out back’s headed to another town. Stay for a ride.” he licked his lips. “Or stay forever.”

“A ride, huh? Is that my ride or yours?” he teased.

Bob clutched Robbie’s hips and squared them against his own. “I just want one night where I see your face in the glow of every passing streetlight.”

He stopped himself from asking why, he knew Bob wouldn’t have an answer. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling it though. What did he have to offer that the hundred people surrounding Bob weren’t already giving him? Why did Bob choose to care for Robbie in fiery impulses and go dark and silent after? If there was enough noise, enough terrible noise, they’d be too busy to miss each other. Fuck, why did Robbie come here anyway? Now he could never leave.

“Where you headed?” Robbie made sure not to sound too interested.

“Prison,” his smile came back, infectious and light. “They might just keep me there if I smuggle you across the border.”

“Uhuh,” Robbie didn’t let on his decision, he extracted himself from Bob, pretending not to notice how Bob’s hands still reached for him, how his hushed voice called him back, and Robbie wandered further into the collective madness.

Don’t let it suck you in, don’t let it drag you down. 

If he went to Bob with his problems...well, he’d have to confront them for starters. But it did occur to him that the rest of Robbie’s crew really only took notice of Bob when he had a handout: gigs, studio time, tanking a record deal to help on their contract—Robbie didn’t figure that last one out right away, but he eventually caught wise. Clearly Bob wanted to help, he wanted to be a part of their lives and somehow it always meant complications on Robbie’s end of it. How were there sides to a side?

Robbie found Joni Mitchell strumming away on her guitar on one of the buses they were readying for departure.

“Joni, thank god!” he could breathe again. “What are you doing here?”

She gave him a half-hug around the guitar. “I meant to stay for a few hours, suddenly it’s days.”

They entered into a hushed conversation discussing all their creative passions which led into the personal ones as well, culminating with Joni’s fascination and more than flirtation with a fellow traveler.

She was exasperated and excited about the whole thing. “It really throws you for a loop when you fall for someone who needs you and doesn’t need you all at once.”

He could commiserate. “Acts like you’re everything in the world to them and the next thing you know they’re on an entirely different planet.”

“Yeah…” she said and he said the same back and they were caught in a dreamlike state. Both knowing they were speaking of different people without verifying by name. All that hanging around David Geffen, they understood each other intrinsically.

The world got busier, it was just about wheels up. Bob hovered behind him, fingers brushing Robbie’s shoulder by means of collecting him.

Bob brought him to a sliding door at the back of a caravan. “This is my bunk, there’s a lock.” He slid open the door revealing a raised bed, atop it a stunning woman scribbling away in a diary, dressed seemingly in all colors and patterns. “Anne, scram.”

“Shaman, you a ladies man,” she chuckled and vacated the bed, taking notes as she went. “He holds the door open, then darts away.”

Waldman, that was her last name. Robbie had to comb his memory. Part of Ginsberg’s circle.

Bob pulled an abandoned dulcimer off his bed and handed it over to Anne. They shared a look, one of secrets, held in repose by wandering mystics. Then he closed the door on her.

“What’s that about?” Robbie asked.

Bob didn’t answer. He pulled the lock closed. “Door lock’s not great but it’ll hold,” he shrugged with no real concern.

There was the fleeting thought Robbie had of what Bob was using or doing to test that. The engines started up and the landscape shifted outside the small window.

Robbie looked at Bob, his face open, eyes clear. Older, tired, sure, but something in there held that blinding magnetism from years before. “It’s good to see you as you.”

Bob wet his bottom lip. “Who else have I been?”

“It’s…” Robbie took him into his arms, “hard to explain.”

“Yeah,” he ran his hand through Robbie's hair and couldn’t stop. “I’m gonna be weird and do this for a while.”

Robbie faked surprise. “Oh, just now you’ll start being weird?”

“Shut up,” the smile on his face spread.

A swing of the bus into another lane of traffic sent them both into the bed. Bob wrapped his arms and legs over Robbie. The way he held him felt like sinking against a clouded sky.

“I’d be happy to hold you through the night,” Bob whispered, breath tickling Robbie’s ear.

He turned around to face him. “I’d be too turned on to let you.”

Try as he did to wipe it all off, stage makeup lingered just under his neck, eyeliner clinging to his lashes. “So you want real trouble then.”

“Within reason, folks are right out there, door or no door.” Was his reticence purely the proximity or did it come from seeing the shadows Bob couldn’t erase?

They kissed, Bob slid against Robbie’s skin. “I need your body against mine and nothing in between.”

Was he going to do this? Was he really walking into this bear trap again? Despite all Robbie’s efforts, he was still easily enamored with that glorious afterglow that came with Bob. Racy passion, tender touches, quiet extremes.

“All right,” he undressed. “I’m believing in the power of the door lock.” Bob did the same and their bodies locked together in a short blast of heat, the chill of the air raising goosebumps on their skin. “What do we do now?”

He closed Robbie’s eyes with a pass of his hand over his face. “I want to feel you. I want you inside. Fill me up, then leave me high and dry. You know how the chorus goes.”

“That’s so messy,” he whispered, “and you’re so loud.”

“Jaime,” he used his real name when he needed to indicate the clear cut truth. “I haven’t cared how others see my life for a long, long time.”

Robbie opened his eyes. “Yeah, but no need to sell out the front row to unwitting voyeurs.”

He hadn’t planned on such vulnerability, but it came out when familiar company was around. Their little trysts became far too risky. Not that Bob cared for his reputation, others did it for him.

Bob slipped two of Robbie’s fingers into his mouth and slicked them with a few curling lashes of his tongue. 

“What is this?” Robbie let his fingers be guided down Bob’s body until they were inserted inside him. “What are you doing to me?”

The concerns of the outside world faded away.

“It’s what you’re doing to me,” Bob pushed Robbie’s hand up in a slow, pumping rhythm.

He let him work it on his own, fascinated with how Bob was a half step away from pleasuring himself. Then Robbie curled his fingers and bent and felt along the drag. 

Bob closed his eyes and let out a long “Nnngh,” Robbie scissored his fingers open and the sound grew. He took over the motion and Bob’s hand dropped away. With every twitch, Bob’s whole body would react. A convulsion deepest in his hips.

“I need—” Robbie started but Bob already knew. 

He let Robbie’s hand retreat as he bent over and wet Robbie’s cock with his mouth. That alone was getting to him, the breath from Bob’s nostrils flooding his skin, Bob’s tongue sliding over his dick, the moan from his lips when he thought he really had him.

“Fuck, fuck, turn over.” Robbie pushed him aside.

Bob complied and Robbie climbed on top of him.

They weren’t completely ready but they started anyway. Then Robbie was shoving his fingers into Bob’s mouth not to wet them but to quiet him. His passion even through pain was obscene.

“Is this good?” Robbie asked and caught Bob’s nod. “More?”

He couldn’t answer with words, just a prolonged noise that tingled against the skin on Robbie’s fingers.

Robbie rocked against him, slammed into him, dropped his hand from his mouth and squeezed Bob’s cock.

Bob let out a cry at regular volume which sounded frighteningly loud and large in the darkness.

Robbie started watching for street lamps, how the lights did shine across Bob’s pale skin. The triangle of light over his back, only for a moment before it was gone. Another swinging by to take its place. Like it couldn’t hold onto him either.

What was he doing? How did it get this far? Once they were boys digging a hole to freedom, now they were men burying themselves.

“I can’t,” Bob arched his back, his spine far too visible in his skin and Robbie could feel that pressure deep inside him ready to blow.

He had tumbled off their chessboard, Bob was falling through the mattress. Robbie only gave it to him harder.

“Come baby, come for me,” unforgiving strokes up front, aggressive rhythm in the back. Faster, he was rising up on it and then he felt Bob spilling out in his fingers and that got him there.

They collapsed into the bedspread and onto each other. Robbie pulled out, come leaking out of Bob’s backside, wiping himself off on the side of Bob’s twig of a leg.

“Fuck,” Bob wiped his eyes and nothing else.

“So whatever happened to secrets, but not secrets?” Robbie remembered the name of the game way back when.

Shit, if he didn’t get his clothes on while he could see them, he’d never find them again. He hurried to put himself back together.

Bob let a bent hand pass for a shrug. “Turns out no one can figure me out, least of all me.”

He looked back at Bob on the bed. It was the pocket of his ribs that was getting to him. The indents in the caverns. “Ain’t that the truth.” He had to look away.

“I could do another round in a bit. If you wanted to.” Bob pulled his underwear on, the snap of the elastic echoed off his bony hips.

“I’m not sure how you can top that.” Robbie got his shoes back on and hung onto the door lock, ready to turn it.

Bob sat up on the edge of the bed. “Boy, I musta got some of that atomic radiation, huh? Nuclear power.”

“Why's that?” he got a button wrong on his shirt which he quickly fixed.

Bob huffed. “Cause you get one dose of me and you run for cover.”

He was being serious, wasn’t he? Maybe it was a joke, it was one of those daggers that was so curved you couldn’t see which way was up. “So I fuck you twice and that’s the cure?”

“Forget it, man.” he got a vest on but no shirt. He meant it all right, Robbie could see it in his face.

“I’m all ears,” as was the rest of this traveling band, surely. “What do you want from me?”

A poison-dipped blade, now they had both turned venomous. Close quarters, high emotions, a touch of anger from the things unexpressed in every encounter.

Bob mumbled an answer into his hand like it needed testing there first but Robbie did one of those condescending, “Speak up,” moves he cribbed from unfortunate primary school teachers.

“I need—” his eyebrows knitted together in this intense frustration, and he pulled the words out of himself. “Something. I need it to mean something. Or else everything is nothing.”

No, not now. Not here. Most of all not this.

“Bob…” There were plenty of people out there ready and willing to be this person.

Like he could hear him. “I don’t care about them, I want you.” Bob wiped his mouth.

Oh god, he was going to say something else, Robbie could feel it. Dread pulling against his spine, he had to shut him up but he couldn’t move, he was frozen to the floor.

Bob said, “I add up all the moments I have with you and it’s never enough. How come it’s always been the opposite for you?”

Tell him he’s wrong. That Robbie did care. Tell him—fuck, what was Robbie supposed to say? No one was going to feel as deeply as Bob on anything, see colors where it was black and white. 

Robbie looked at him, really looked at him. Parts of his face were swollen, his body ill-assembled, were those marks on the back of his hands always there or were they just from the bed?

It wasn’t exactly pointing toward all systems go. How could he tell him the timing was off? Robbie’s life was becoming increasingly fragile with The Band’s activities and everything else, he was certainly not equipped to take on whatever this was.

He could only get so far on false promises, Bob would know the difference. Bob could tell in an instant when he was being jerked around.

So he told him...he hated to say the truth, because it wasn’t. It was something that was true. That he knew barring divine intervention wouldn’t happen. Robbie stacked the deck.

He said, “I need you to get help.”

“Huh?” The conversational turn was so quick, Bob had nothing to hold onto. Or was he frightened that the conversation hadn’t changed at all.

Robbie slapped his hand on the door. “You’ve got a tour full of enablers here.”

He thought about it. “Not Joan, she's a dis-abler.” he scratched the side of his face. “Ginsberg’s bit of an un-abler.”

“All I know is you’re doing the same shit I thought you stopped years ago and no one’s said or done a goddamned thing.” Including Robbie, really, but he wouldn’t dare go into that.

The words sat as limp as Bob. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell you what let’s get Joan in here, I like her. Then you can recite for her and me the toxic things you’ve ingested or injected into your system and how you’re planning on repairing your visibly tortured soul.”

If it was coke he could forgive it. More than forgive it, hell he’d suck a line off Bob’s dick. That sounded pretty good, they should have done that.

“You want me to ask you to leave.” Bob squinted like he caught the reason, got a glimpse of the card shuffle. “While you’re two-thirds out the door.”

He was a kaleidoscope of a person-shapes set to constant change, a fight was impossible.

“All I want is for you to get better, I thought you left this in the past.”

“How do I leave the past when it doesn’t leave me?” but then Bob tired of rehashing it.

Pills, powder, or something else? Something else. There weren’t any track marks. Robbie knew what to look for by then.

“Look, you were at the show, we’re fine. Stop worrying about things that aren’t—” Bob got up off the bed and things must have gone fuzzy because Bob’s knees buckled and what color he had dropped out of him. He hit the corner of the room with a thud and slid down the wall, managing to keep himself from falling to the floor. He wrenched himself back to a fully conscious state and surveyed his situation. “Shit.”

“Sit down I’m gonna get you some water. Maybe something to eat?” he shuddered to think what these people kept onboard.

“I don’t need anything,” Bob clawed up the wall till he was upright.

“Out on the road like this, when was the last time you had a decent meal?” That was more of Robbie’s feelings about life on the road, but goddamnit it if being on a tour bus didn’t stir this shit up.

“Stop,” Bob begged. “Just stop.”

There was that sting like when his father hit him. That surprise blow across the face. He had to touch his skin to make sure it hadn’t split apart. “That’s it, isn't it?”

He wasn’t eating. Or if he was, it wasn’t staying eaten. Robbie thought it was some Dr. Feelgood B12 shit but this was just Bob, wasn’t it? That talk at River Fest, it all boiled down to this.

When Robbie confronted Levon on hard drugs there was artful misdirection. Playful anger, anything to get the scent off him. This was different. It was like Bob wanted to be caught but also feared anything that would prevent him from being invisible.

The last time he saw this look in Bob’s eyes he was peeling a rifle out of his hands. It showed up earlier, some time after he dragged Bob’s drowning body out of that bathtub. When did it start, was it there in the coat closet, was it there before that?

He was wrong, he was so wrong. That look was always there, it never left Bob.

It took a bit of force but Bob fought it off. “Robbie, c'mon man.”

“What are you doing to yourself?” How was he doing it, getting it past all these people? Or did they not care?

Bob shivered. There were goosebumps on his skin again, he rubbed his arms to rid them. “Nothing. Hey I’ll do whatever you want okay? But don’t do that ultimatum shit. I hardly agree to contracts, I won’t agree to this.”

“When we first held hands, was that not a contract?”

Bob couldn’t answer, he stopped looking at him. Any expression he had glazed over.

Robbie tried to win him back. “I want to help you. I want to be there for you. But I don’t know what’s wrong and you don’t want my help. At this point I don’t know what you want, but it certainly isn’t self-preservation. I suppose I could destroy our trust, this tour, your career to get you whatever you needed, to force you to improve. But we both know I probably won’t do that, and you’ll keep on abusing yourself for the satisfaction of feeling contained when the whole world is trying to get a piece of you, and you’ll live and die a miserable creature out on the road feigning the energy to stand.” It felt like he was wielding a machete, taking chunks out of both of them. “Now can I please get you something to eat?”

Silence aside for the road beneath them. The engine rattling on.

Where was the boy who once dead asleep rolled over and called him lover? And hearing that word the next day when Robbie asked if he’d said shove over or lover, that very word made him blush harder than his skin could take? 

“Your love,” Bob said it like he heard Robbie, like he punched through time to snatch that memory up and reclaim it.

“Hm?” Robbie had to shake his head to snap back.

“You’re trying to get me on the diagonal, you want me to get help but you don’t want to help.” He acted like it was so simple. “I want your love, that's what I want.”

“That’s not—”

“On the menu, right.”

“No. Listen I care about you.” Robbie went to touch Bob’s arm, guide him back to safety.

Bob violently shrugged off the hold. “You know when I first started hanging around you, a whole lotta folks warned me that you were just in it for the fame, camera time, for what you could get out of it. That’s just professionally speaking, you understand. No one was peeking behind the curtain.”

Robbie moved to speak, but Bob cut him off. “I didn’t trust ‘em for one minute. I know who my friends are. Robbie’s my friend. I care about him, he cares about me. I look out for him, he looks out for me. I love...him,” his voice cracked. “He loves me?”

Robbie had never seen him this way, this was the breaking point they’d been staving off for years.

“But it was never about accolades, was it? They got that wrong. I get it now, I just didn’t want to get it. You’re a fuckin’ scientist. Been studying me for years, got all the how’s and why’s and when’s. But your study has rotten results and you don’t like that, and it’s too late to change the tide.” Tears welled up in his eyes, shocking blue and spiteful. “The minute I stopped living up to your image of me, I became a disgusting plaything you were too busy to throw away.”

“Bobby, I do love you,” his voice sounded helpless and strange. He wanted to say more but he was too stunned to think of anything.

“See that’s where you’re wrong,” he wiped his eyes with a knuckle. “You don’t love me, Jaime, you just wanted to know what it was like to be loved.”

“Bobby,” Robbie tried to reach out. Bob’s brain was devouring itself from lack of everything. “You’re—You’re not making sense.”

“How’s this for sense, any contracts between us are null and void. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Bob turned away from him and lit a cigarette. “Now get the fuck off my tour bus.”

Robbie swore he could hear the neon light of Bob’s soul click off just then, that change to make himself thoroughly unreachable. Surely it was the lighter flicking closed, but still.

Robbie left the small excuse for a room and rejoined the party atmosphere of the other riders, too stoned and self-involved to gather the goings-on behind a flimsy door and fake walls, or so it seemed (or so he hoped.)

There was a problem with the things Bob wanted and expected. He wanted stability and comfort but had none. He wanted a life with Robbie but barely could stand his own. He yearned for transparency but was too full of shadows.

Robbie got off at the next rest stop and bought some cigarettes. He half expected things to be resolved while someone was pounding a candy bar out of a vending machine. Mumbled apologies and almost promises. It didn’t happen. He watched the caravan leave, dust in the air, mud on the tires.

So Robbie put a few calls through the pay phone, thanking whatever god was out there that one of his foolhardy friends could offer a ride back to Montreal before he had to ask his mother for one. And he sat at a picnic table, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hands to keep warm, wondering what tale he was going to spin his saviors of the night to distance himself from this moment. And how, if at all, that story would change when he had to look himself in the mirror the next day. Probably none of it would stay. The whole night wiped clean, like greasepaint on a rag.


	10. Ten

**October 1992**

He had a dream once. Tried months on end to get it to come back for another visit to no avail.

They were out on the beach, when he was first convincing Bob to move to Malibu. The sun like honey coating the clouds, the water he could hear but barely see. He was too busy looking at Bob.

“It’s nice, right?” he reached out and touched Bob’s face, ran his thumb over some stray beard hairs that missed the last pass of a razor.

Bob’s smile, this one, the real one, couldn’t be beat. “What’s nice?”

“This place,” he swept his other hand out to capture the space and when momentum carried it back he took Bob with him pinning him to the sand.

For someone so deliberately cagey, he loved being caught like this, “It’s all right.”

“Just all right?” Robbie narrowed his eyes.

“I like it fine,” Bob laughed. “When I’m with you, I can’t think of no place else.”

They kissed and it didn’t end. He could feel that smile against his own and they stole into each other’s arms and waited for the surf to carry them away.

Soon the tide was around their ankles and Bob whispered in his ear, “What are you waiting for?”

Or was it what are you wading for?

No, it was the first and as it was a dream and the connections were dodgy, he was inside already, knowing almost intellectually how good it felt. Here they could go on forever. Slap, slap, slap of skin, crashing waves, hushed breath on salt air. The scent of his sex. 

Could he come in a dream? Would he find any release? Surely Bob would leave him or he would leave Bob before it got that far. 

He was frustrating himself, teetering on the edge of orgasm for so long that he dug down deep and laid into Bob with the urgency of a lit fuse. Bob scratched for a hold on Robbie’s back and Robbie closed his hand on Bob’s neck. He squeezed so hard he felt that surging pressure in his groin and then—and then nothing.

When he woke, his hard-on was unavoidable. He dealt with that first. Then he balled up the stray covers beside him and breathed deeply into them. Why couldn’t some remnant still be there for him? Why couldn’t the dredges of his fantasies offer a salient resolution? And how had the reality been ruined so completely?

Though, what reality did they have? It should have been worse, that idea would strike him on occasion. News reports, medical journals, marches in the streets. It could have been so much worse. Condoms made rare appearances. They missed the AIDS epidemic by a sliver of time. Needles and drugs, wild parties. Any number of diseases could have come their way. Still he had a real sickness, the dream pointed that out. Bob made Robbie feel invincible.

He’d blame recent events for that mix of memories. The 30th anniversary concert was happening that night, Dylan interpretations pulled through artists and friends, including The Band, only not including Robbie.

He passed on it. Was it The Band that gave him that final pause or was it Bob? He couldn’t bear to walk into that whirlwind again.

He got lost that whole day. He tried to get drunk, and succeeded in getting sick. Then he got moderately high from roaches he’d pulled from an unclean ashtray and it was back to sleeping. He all but begged the dream to come back, but it refused. 

Better off really, once he got to thinking about it. For what was there to come back to? He’d raze to the ground everything they kept sacred if it meant he could go on living in peace. That was what Bob had done, surely.

For so many years they’d been ghosts. Forgotten fragments. Time and again he’d find something, some obscure old artist or exceptional new one and he’d want to call Bob up and share it with him. But it never seemed right and he figured he wouldn’t get an answer anyway, what with Bob always on a tour these days.

He had to mourn the loss of whatever it was they had and stop wishing for it to come back. He could do it, he had the strength.

But when he closed his eyes, he could see and feel Bob’s smile, the sound of the ocean picking up on them. Bob asking what he was waiting for and Robbie with no response at all.


	11. Eleven

**March 2000**

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, once you were in, became sort of a class reunion. And the fact that Eric had asked Robbie to be part of not only the induction ceremony and speech, but to play with him as well, was almost too much to take. Of course he said yes right away.

Black suit, black tie, black guitar. It all went together. He felt so good in that room with those people, he swore he never had such confidence in all his life.

There might have been thousands of faces he knew in there, others he knew of or they knew him. So many people to catch up with, too many stories to reminisce about, occasional promises on how they’d find something to jam on in the future. Easy conversations, nothing too deep.

Until he saw a head of hair unmistakable in a crowd. Not the same cut, not the same color, but still easily recognizable. When you saw it next to you for mornings on end crushed against a pillow, feathered across the bones of your ribs, it was hard to forget.

Get it over with, say hello. Do the friendly in-public thing before someone makes up a story. Rolling Stone writes it up as the night’s biggest snub, no thanks. Neither of them needed that on their hands. So Robbie walked over to him.

There was Bob in a white jacket backing out of a circle of conversation. They’d asked if he’d seen any movies lately and he struggled to answer with Tombstone, someone else remembered that was from a few years ago and all Bob could say was yeah.

He didn’t want to tap him on the shoulder or anything, he didn’t want to scare him or make it seem too intimate.

He waited for a blind spot to turn into a glance. The lock of eyes equally tantalizing as it was something to run away from. The other conversationalists disappeared, as did most of the outside world.

He was at a loss for how to start, “You still touring?”

“You still not touring?” Bob countered.

Stalemate. He tried another fair play question. “How’s your guitar playing?”

Bob gave a noncommittal shrug. “Mangled my hand a while back, didn’t help things.”

“What happened?” Robbie looked for scars but couldn’t catch them.

He gave a flick to his hand like he was adjusting his shirt cuffs. “Going for my wrist and missed.”

“Really,” he wasn’t going to take the bait.

A busser brushed past them with trays of emptied glasses, Bob lowered his voice. “Or maybe I was trying to scrape off something that was stuck there a long time ago.”

That stuff was too heavy, better duck and weave, “I like the moustache, very 1920s silent movie villain.”

He squinted and pursed his lips. “I also get Vincent Price.”

“For many reasons I’m sure.” Alluding to some dubious sexuality without officially stamping him. Cheap shot, no reason to hit. He backed off. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he mumbled. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Bob,” Robbie laughed. “I’m doing the Clapton thing. The announcement, the video, I’m playing with him.”

Bob nodded like it all made sense and then asked, “Tonight?”

“Yes tonight, what other night?” Honestly if he didn’t know better...

Someone waved him down to get his ass backstage, he touched Bob’s arm and gave him a quick send-off. “Bob, I love you. I have to go now. Let’s catch up sometime.”

“I love you?” Bob repeated it, not yet sounding his own.

The gig was unbelievable. It was Eric’s night and he was happy to give him the floor and play backup, but Eric delighted in throwing riffs for Robbie to match and trading off solos. Picking the song Eric performed in The Last Waltz was such a compliment. And that laugh Robbie got telling the Woodstock story wasn’t half-bad either.

It wasn’t until he got offstage that he thought about his words with Bob, about what Bob said.

What if by tonight Bob meant could he see him later that night? It had been so long he’d forgotten that with Bob sentences were icebergs and he could only catch so much on the surface.

But once he got back to his seat, Bob was nowhere to be found. He waited around like it was just a fluke that he was gone from his sight lines. But the situation didn’t change.

He stopped to get coffee on the way out from a roach coach, and maybe it was the weather or how strong and awful that coffee tasted, like Mississippi mud, that he was reminded of another Bob he’d lost long ago.

**July 1969**

Mississippi River Fest was top-rate. It validated everything The Band was trying to do. They had their sound right on the money. The fact that they were able to convince Bob to come along for the ride was all the better.

Back at the hotel, everybody was splitting off and celebrating. Bob pulled Robbie into the stairwell while others were hitting the elevator. He ducked under the cave of stairs and lit two cigarettes in his mouth, passing one to Robbie.

“Man,” Bob exhaled. “We played that whole encore and I don’t even think anyone knew who I was.”

“How does that feel?” Tasting anonymity again looked good on him.

“Exhilarating,” Robbie had never seen Bob smile that big. “You get that crystal clear connection between you and who the music is for.”

Did he mean the audience, himself, Robbie, did he mean God? Sometimes Bob could be so slippery. Robbie didn’t ask.

Bob waited till he smoked about a third of the cigarette before grinding it into the floor with the heel of his boot. Then he and Robbie took a far more private elevator ride to their floor.

He walked Bob to his door and started to back off. “My room’s down this way,” Robbie hooked his thumb down the rest of the hallway.

“Where are you going?” he tugged on Robbie’s hand and lassoed him back into his arms.

“Yeah, I don’t know why I try to fake you out.”

Once he got him into the room, Bob pulled him onto the bed. They talked through the set as their hands ran a more exploratory mission.

They’d graduated to a pathway Robbie viewed as the safe touch. Hardly anything was off limits now, but before—

First it was where the injuries were, careful with the neck, don’t jostle spine, don’t grasp his head with force. Then when Bob discovered that life off speed meant other things slowed down, guilt stained skin, discomfort sounded an alarm near the center of his body: his legs, his waist, his stomach. He looked absolutely normal but that was too much for him. Robbie worked around it till it was out of both their minds, but occasionally he’d still catch Bob wince in his struggle.

But right now all inhibitions were gone. They’d only lost their jackets, maybe it was because they were still clothed. But it had to be more than that.

“You know what I realized?” Robbie ran a line down Bob’s chest to his navel and gripped the softened line of his hips, easy to find from the frame of Bob’s belt.

“Hm?” his lips dotted the side of Robbie’s neck in a complex pattern.

Robbie wanted to tell him that Bob not only felt solid, he felt stable. He settled on, “You’re okay, you’re okay right now.”

Bob rolled his eyes. “I don’t know about that.”

“No I can tell,” Robbie took Bob’s hand and kissed the blisters. “You're healthy, you’re happy, you’re alive.”

He demurred the vision of himself, he could only partially agree. “Trying to be like I am, not how I used to be.”

Robbie stroked the side of Bob’s thumb. “Can I ask the current you something I’ve been meaning to ask the old you?”

“Sure,” a shy, geeky smile crept onto his face, maybe he was thinking it was something romantic, some secrets from their early connections.

That wasn’t what Robbie had loaded. “What made you want to take the shortcut out of the human race?”

“You really wanna dig up that corpse?” Bob took his hand away, the smile long gone. He attempted disappointment and disgust, offerings to draw the eye away from the very real anxiety of being seen through.

Robbie promised, “I’ll let you bury it straight away, once we’re through.”

“Do you think it’s right to rake up the past? Oh, I like the past but I don’t like critics.” Bob studied his nails.

Didn’t sound like lyrics, he took a wild stab at a guess. “Henry Miller.”

“Close, sorta close.” Bob allotted partial credit. All of this was to buy more time, distance himself from the ask. So that whenever he got pulled into an answer, the real him wouldn’t be there to deliver it.

“I’m not here to judge, I want to understand.”

He started out almost offended, put out, but that attitude couldn’t stay trapped in his vocal cords. “You knew what it was like out there, you knew what I was up against. My brain wasn’t my own, I had cannibalistic insides. No chance to feel the sun when I was shrouded in darkness. I couldn’t live like that anymore, I couldn’t live...” he looked at Robbie and a part of his soul withered. “And I swear it ain’t nothing on you, but it hit me awful hard that home was a place without you in it.”

He shouldn’t have asked, he never wanted to be in on that narrative. It was hard enough being near it at the time. All he could offer was, “I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t want to tell you.” he rubbed his neck. “So that’s over, or... it’s not over but it’s different now. You got a hundred percent of whatever’s left of me.”

Bob sewed it up nice and sweet, he could have left it like that where the words could no longer get to him.

But he couldn’t leave it there. Robbie had just dug the well, he had to lower the bucket down, and pull up all he could carry.

“I like that percentage.” he kissed the top of his head. “While I’ve got all of you here…”

“Oh no interrogation station. Stop the train, let me out.” He’d lightened up, unaware of the quickness or severity Robbie came armed with.

Bob was so good at avoidance, at restricting the conversation flow, that Robbie had to hit quick and hard with the questions he’d never get out otherwise.

“That time you showed up to my apartment, beat to a bloody pulp, beat beyond recognition—”

Light snuffed out, a deathly pallor arose. “...y-yeah?”

“That night,” he stopped, for a second he thought Bob might actually get sick. He’d started to hold his sides. “That night you said you only remembered where I lived. Was that true?”

That incurred some injury. “You want that, you don’t want why it happened.”

“I don’t care what happened or why it happened. You could have gone to anyone or no one. Why me?”

“I think you underestimate how deeply I care for you.” His false smile, a crease of pain.

“I thought you were going to die.”

“I thought so too. So I sought the company I desired on my end of days.” Bob was able to tear away the hold he had on his sides and deliver the warmth of his touch to Robbie, feeling the muscles of his upper body. “Fell asleep with your arms around me, your body beside mine. If I didn’t wake up...well you get it.”

“One more question.”

“One more?” Bob’s eyes twinkled in the night. “Hey how’s about I ask you some questions? When didya lose your sense of wonder? How come these days all your friends look at you with one eye twitching? Why does this feel like raiding the safe right before you flee the bank?”

Robbie didn’t respond. “Tell me about everything else.”

“I don’t have that kind of time,” he rolled over with a fake laugh that sounded vaguely British.

“You know what I’m asking about,” Robbie touched Bob’s wrist, encircling it with his fingers. “There was a time when I was sure that if I tried to touch you, my hand would simply pass through. I was afraid, your skin white porcelain, bone china.“

“I can’t—” It was right along the fault line, his voice was so quiet, so full of pain. He got his wrist away but it made no difference. He was still caught.

“Shhh,” he ran his fingers through Bob’s hair. “Just tell me a story.”

Bob fell silent, the air stagnated. He closed his eyes and Robbie did the same. How bright the light was behind their eyes. Swirling, squiggling beams trapped under eyelids.

When a voice started up, Robbie couldn’t recognize it as Bob’s.

“One day Alice fell down the rabbit hole. Or was it through the looking glass? And there were pills there that said eat me and the wine said drink me. And that was all there was, on and on, an endless refrain.”

“I remember,” Robbie said.

“Soon after she was out of Wonderland the world was a-spinnin on a new axis. Nothing felt safe like before. And she found out she could live without the little things that were keeping her together, but that sometimes it was easier to hold onto yourself when there was a little less to hold.”

Robbie opened his eyes. He brushed his thumb to Bob’s cheek to reawaken him from that nightmarish tale. “But you’re good now?”

Robbie could sense their limits conversationally. Bob knew there were things about him Robbie couldn’t possibly understand. But he wasn’t angry or frustrated by the pursuit, he was just dog-tired from living that life. A lifetime without sleep, he’d never catch up from the deficit.

Bob didn’t answer so Robbie tried again, “You’re good now though? Tell me you’re good.”

“Jaime,” Bob said. “I haven’t been good for a long long time, since before you met me. All I have are the moments I spend with you, those moments are the best I’ve ever felt.”

That, had he the film strip in hand, would be where he’d cut it. Fade out with an excellent tune to blast in the background. Otis Redding, Ray Charles. But life didn’t work like that.

Because he’d said “I like making you feel good,” and pulled him closer, feeling that restraint. And he took Bob’s hand to a place it didn’t agree on going, shaking a bit in the confused struggle.

A pulse with the fire of the sun, firm, orgasmic. He forced Bob’s hand into cupping the erection that was heating his every atom.

“You’re turned on right now? Man, I’m spilling my guts out to you.” Bob pulled his arm loose.

“It was a compelling tale,” he wasn’t going to apologize. Bob wouldn’t, if the roles were reversed, right?

He’d gotten aroused from the interlude. From uncovering every secret Bob held shut away and locked up in despair. As horrific as it sounded, Robbie had finally reached through and finished the puzzle. He was certain he’d gotten the whole picture of Bob, no one else had that, not really. He wanted to complete the circuit, make it official.

Bob hung his head and shakily lit a cigarette. “If ever I think I know where I’m at, I’ll be sure to check with you first.”

“What’s that?” he didn’t understand.

He’d stolen the light from his eyes, the youth from his face. “Just thought I was worth more than I was, is all.”

Robbie waited, he let Bob cool off from that stamp of disapproval as he undressed. His way of restating the roles.

“Are you done?” Robbie asked him, erect cock in his hands, pulling at its thickness. Eyeing Bob between strokes.

Bob screwed his eyes shut, his hands still vibrating with that dousing of fear and adrenaline. Then he let out some clearly ashamed curses as he unbuckled his belt.

Why did he pull up the floorboards? Was it an earnest search for what Bob kept hidden or did Robbie want to rip the foundation out to prove nothing could be built there?

**March 2000**

He was looking down at the end of that coffee cup, thinking about railroad switches. If the tracks of his life had been rearranged along the way, where would his train have ended up? Then he looked up and found he’d unknowingly docked at a familiar station when a shambling figure slinked from the shadows.

The smile just about stung his lips. “God, I thought you’d left.”

Bob looked back to the shadows like they were calling him. “You’ve read Chekhov.”

Robbie didn’t know if that was a new thought or an explanation for his return.

“Been thinking bout him a lot lately. That and that gray suit you had made for me,” Bob cocked his head to the side. “You remember you took me to your tailor?”

Robbie swore his throat had closed up but he could still speak. “Of course.”

“Had fine upstanding knights in those days, and your handmade suit of armor.”

“It was a good look.” Iconic really, by some accounts.

“I could feel close to you even if I wasn’t. You were in the stitches, in the seams. I loved having you around me.” Bob’s smile was slight but Robbie still caught it.

Sometimes when Robbie would catch a glimpse of Bob in modern times, he’d get sidetracked thinking of how old they were, of how much time had gone by, but that smile, that smile was so familiar, it was transformative.

“It was a great place to be,” Robbie said.

Quick as it appeared, the smile was gone. “Chekov’s characters, they talk about what they want, what they’re gonna do, but they never get around to doing it, you know? Those three sisters ain’t going to Moscow, cherry orchard’s gonna get chopped down not saved, everybody who falls in love, tries to succeed, make a life...it don’t work out.” He watched the passing street traffic, the minor noise of truck engines, the occasional screech of brakes and wheels spinning felt like a welcome cover. Bob turned back to Robbie. “After a while, the suit wasn’t enough and I couldn’t wear it no more.”

Robbie looked down at the empty cup in his hands. There had to be something more between them. Though it felt hopeless, he had to try. “You want to get some coffee?”

“Problem there,” Bob stuck his hands in his pockets and edged toward the darkness, “is that you want coffee and I want something else. End of the act, ain’t neither of us getting what we want.”

Robbie let him walk away, he couldn’t think of what to say, what reasoning. He didn’t know a way to route them back together.


	12. Twelve

**November 2019**

They were shooting the shit for what counted as backstage at Bridgestone Arena. Robbie fell into his natural state of telling stories, it helped ease the ice break of pain in his heart.

He’d finished up a hilarious one on Van Morrison in Woodstock that left some gasping for air, when Don Was took the opportunity to ask, “You and Bob, still close?”

God, this was coming up too much in interviews these days. He hated giving a flat no, though it was just about the truth. Instead he’d give them some of the old carnival barker flash, distract them with the documentary pitch and mention how they’d talked when Bob gave his green light on appearing, great stuff, future projects maybe, and so on and so on till the journalist bid adieu.

But Don knew Bob, they’d cut an album together, though that was a while back as well. Did he have some insight there? Or was Robbie getting too jumpy on the subject?

So he sidestepped it as only the missing piece of that puzzle could. “That’s a difficult question.”

Don, happy to keep the covers on, continued on with his Shirley Temple, Bob, and Paula Abdul tale and took over entertaining the masses.

Others attempted to locate Bob, with quick google searches putting him at the Beacon in his ongoing tour, one of the techs claimed to know what hotel he was staying at and announced it.

“If he’s in New York, why doesn’t he just stay at his place?” Robbie threw his hands up.

“Some people like the road, they ain’t got no home, Robbie.” Someone answered and he swore it was the ghost of Levon, because he knew that voice, goddamn it he knew that exact voice. He looked around like maybe he’d be there standing just at his shoulder. But there was no claimant to the sound.

What if no one had said it and it was only in his mind? What if all he had left were failing memories?

After the encores played and the absolute high from an unrepeatable performance somehow finding a way to double, Robbie was taken by the current and he needed to share it with someone.

He called through to the hotel remembering that and a few favorite aliases, forgetting in the excitement there was a contact in his cell phone that would have made things easier.

The receiver clunked against a few surfaces before it made contact with a face. “Wake up calls getting earlier and earlier, huh?”

It was an hour later in New York, he’d forgotten the time change. 

“Bob, it’s Robbie. Robbie Robertson.” Why was he introducing himself? That was stupid. Couldn’t walk it back now. “It’s Jaime. I’m sorry if I woke you I just had to call.”

He could hear Bob slide against the bedsheets. “Mm, Nashville yeah?” 

Bob had been keeping tabs on him. “This night is unlike anything I could have imagined. I miss everyone so much. People, brothers I can’t get back. I miss you. God do I miss you.”

He didn’t want to say how he watched Lukas Nelson pour every bit of himself, every ounce of his heart and soul into singing Forever Young until atoms in the arena were vibrating. How he watched that and felt that joy, but how it made him wish for a little of Bob’s light. How with Bob it cut deep, the way that song launched out of him. So powerful, so effortless.

Such a long delay on the phone, he thought Bob had fallen back asleep.

And then Bob said, “So come here.”

“To New York?”

“Sure you’re just flying home after this, right?”

He was starting to feel walls close in on him. The room was a whole lot smaller than it was moments ago. “Mhm?”

“Fly to me.”

“What?” Robbie cupped the phone around his face, suddenly nervous of eavesdroppers.

“Get on a plane and fly to me,” Bob made sure to put some extra enunciation in there.

It was wild, unpredictable, it wasn’t who they were any more. “I leave now, you gonna wait up for me?”

Bob scoffed, “Been waiting for you more’n half a century, what’s new?”

“Okay,” Robbie said. Though he hadn’t really bought in. “What’s gonna happen when I get there?”

“Weeeell,” Bob drawled. “Not everything works like it used to.”

“Things didn’t work back then either, as I recall.” And they shared a laugh that was quiet and small. “That’s not what I meant.”

“He wants to know the stakes,” Bob mused out loud. “All right I’ll give you fair warning. These days I play for keeps. You come here, I don’t ever let you go.”

Robbie’s lips were cracked, his throat bone dry. “That sounds nice.”

Gruff as ever, Bob cracked, “Nice went out bout twenty years back. This here’s what remains of lonesome desperation.”

Robbie wasn’t sure his voice was near his body anymore. “Like I said, nice.”

“I’m crawling under the covers now, gonna dream the next time I lay my head, it’s right by yours. That should I reach out in the night, your hand is back in mine where it belongs.”

“Bob, I—” he started.

“I know,” Bob said and slowly dropped the phone back on the hook, letting Robbie off it.

It was a good conversation, he could let it go at that. Leave whatever they had in the times and the frozen memories where it worked and allow the rest to slide away.

The getaway cars and vans were beginning to circle. He hoped to get the same driver as earlier, no conversation, no hassle, just fine, quiet service.

He went through his wallet, at first looking for enough of a tip for his driver and there in the pocket behind his ID was a crumbling piece of paper, words half-faded. Words Bob gave to him ages past. He opened it and read it through again and again, words he’d kept close but afraid to contend with over so many years.

“Fan of Robert Burns?” someone asked.

“What?” Robbie looked around wildly.

Emmylou Harris was by his side. “Sorry I was reading over your shoulder, looked like you got a slice of one of his works, I like the modern take.”

“Robert Burns wrote this,” he said it slowly, then again with a laugh. “Of course he did, thank you darling. Thank you. You were wonderful tonight. Spectacular.” He gave her another kiss just as he did onstage and wandered off in a terribly familiar haze.

That little thief. Robbie would love nothing more than to slap that piece of paper right by Bob’s face and tell him what a goddamn scavenger he was, how nothing really belonged to him. Every word in the world at his disposal, and he was stealing this shit. 

He’d have to wait till Bob got his glasses on to see what he was copping to, if he even could read or remember it, but it was worth waiting for. Was this a joke, Robbie would ask him, was Robbie the fool, was it all a lie or was it still true? And no matter what was said, he’d pull Bob close and tell him he always loved him, he never needed the words.

He bumped into Don Was by the door. Don had slipped his leather duster back on and gave Robbie a smile just as slick.

“Oh, sorry.” Robbie shook his head to clear it.

“Hey man, you want to grab a drink? A couple of us were gonna hit the George Jones if it wasn’t too crazy.”

“Um…” he had to bounce it off someone, make sure there was something there to hold onto. “What are the odds of getting a flight to New York this late?” Once he said it out loud, he knew he could do it, that he had to do it. “There’s something I left there and I just remembered I can’t get by without it.”

Don looked up at him and nodded. “Let’s get a drink, then I’ll get you to him.”

“That works,” Robbie checked in with the palm of his hand, more lines there than ever before. “He got to me a long time ago.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, sorry it was forever long. Maybe now I can get some peace without these guys rattling around my head for a bit. I swear I had a life at some point.


End file.
